Going to the ballpark and taking in a Major League Baseball game is a great way to spend a summer evening. But you know what’s even better? Seeing a Major League Baseball game for cheap.

Yes, watching baseball can be expensive. The average price to buy a seat for a MLB game is twenty-eight dollars. And you can expect to spend at least that much on parking and refreshments when you take yourself out to the ballgame. You can, of course, cut down on the parking expense by not driving to the game and spend less on the concession stand by not ordering that second beer. You can also cut down on your ticket expense by using a few simple steps.

First, you should try to find a discounted ticket online. There are many places you can buy a baseball ticket on the Internet from your favorite team’s website to Stubhub, the online marketplace owned by eBay. But the best place to look for a cheap baseball ticket is on a ticket search site such as SeatGeek.

The way these website work is that they cull data from sixty online secondary ticket markets — including Stubhub, TicketNetwork, TicketsNow and Razorgator — essentially giving you search of all the secondary ticket markets in one search.

You can imagine how this benefits anyone who wants to buy a cheap baseball ticket. Right there, on your screen, is the entirety of the market for ticket at that moment. All you have to do is take out your credit card and buy the least expensive.

There are, however, still other ways to get a cheap baseball ticket. In fact, you can probably get the cheapest baseball ticket possible by doing a little legwork and finding yourself an old-fashion ticket scalper.

While there is no doubt online markets have cut into traditional ticketing scalping, there is still a time period — right before the game begins — in which the best place to buy a ticket is from that shady looking guy standing outside of the stadium. The closer to game time the better because if he doesn’t sell the ticket by the first couple innings it becomes totally worthless.

The drawbacks to buying from a ticket scalper is it might not be technically legal. However the chances you would get in trouble for this buying a scalped ticket astronomically low.

Even better than a cheap ticket is one that doesn’t cost you any money at all and the Internet provides a couple venues in which you can get a baseball ticket without ponying up any cash.

The first is to simply make an appeal on your social media network for a ticket. If you have enough friends on Facebook and Twitter it stands to reason one of them might have season tickets they are not going to use on that particular day and would be willing to give them to you for nothing or a nominal fee.

Another suggestion is to go on Craigslist and offer up an interesting barter for game tickets. A good trade for a free or cheap ticket would be a ride to the game or a nice home cooked meal.

There is also another completely different tact to take when you want to get a cheap baseball ticket: Don’t go to a Major League game. There is minor league baseball in driving distance of just about anywhere in America. And not only are minor league tickets a fraction of the price that charged by their parent clubs, but they also charge a lot less for parking and concessions Cheaper still would be a trip to your local college baseball stadium.

As you can see, there are many ways to get cheap baseball tickets. A lack of funds should never stop anyone from taking in America’s Pastime.

It used to be if you wanted to buy a ticket to a Major League game you’d have to go over to the box office at the stadium and buy one, or pre-order the ticket and have it delivered in the mail, or buy it quasi-legally form a scalper who is hanging around outside the stadium

These are all still popular ways to gain entry to your favorite ballpark, but in this brave new digital age your ticket by options have massively expanded.

The easiest way to buy tickets online is to log onto to MLB.com and click the tickets’ section. That will bring you to a list of every team. Click on the team you want to see play and a layout of the stadium with the pricing of each section and the availability of tickets will be presented. You can also get this setup be going directly to a team’s official website. When buying a ticket through MLB or one of its clubs the order is generally being processed by Ticketmaster.

If you are purchasing a ticket this way a good trick is to Google “discount code” plus the team you want to see play because there is typically going to be a discount code option before payment, and you might get lucky and find a relevant discount code on a fan forum which could save you big bucks on the final purchase.

Another way to buy Major League Baseball tickets online is through third party secondary markets.

The most famous of these legal “digital scalpers” is Stubhubub, which is the largest secondary-market ticket marketplace in the United States. You can buy or sell tickets on Stubhub, which is owned by eBay, and the prices fluctuate according to the demand for the game. Stubhub makes their money by charging a 15 percent commission on each transaction.

Craigslist is another good place to find individuals selling tickets. And since there is no commission on Craigslist transactions you might find a better deal than you would on a site such as Stubhub.

There are also online services which obtain big chunks of unsold tickets from brokers, corporations, promoters and other sources and then sell them to the public. Scorebig.com is s leading example of this service.

Scorebig allows you to bid, Priceline-style, on undersold tickets. While it is a great place to get discount tickets, such a service is not going to work if there is a lot of demand for the particular game you want to go see.

There are a lot of online baseball ticket buying options out there. But to make your search for the best ticket price is as efficient as possible you may want to use the ticket search engine website Seatgeek.com.

Seatgeek mines secondary ticket market transaction from the 60 most popular websites in that category, and then displays all the prices in one easy to analyze interface.

If that doesn’t work for your price range you can always try Groupon. Doing an internal search after logging onto the deal site will reveal if they have any major league baseball ticket options still open.

Finally, a good way to get baseball tickets on the Internet is simply to ask. Go on a social media site like Facebook or Twitter and mention you’d like to see your favorite baseball team play this upcoming Thursday night or whenever and that you are looking for tickets.

If you have many friends or followers, there’s a good chance one of them has season tickets and isn’t going to be able to use them that day.

If you’re lucky, they may just offer you the tickets for free, since they were otherwise going to go to waste. And as enjoyable as a night at the ballpark is a free night at the ballpark is even better.