Chattanooga Lookouts

The Chattanooga Lookouts are a Minor League Baseball team of the Southern League and the Double-A affiliate of the Cincinnati Reds. They are based in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and are named for nearby Lookout Mountain. The team plays its home games at AT&T Field which opened in 2000 and seats 6,340 fans. They previously played at Engel Stadium from 1930 through 1999, with a one-year break in Montgomery, Alabama's Cramton Bowl in 1943.

History


In 1906, Oliver Burnside "O.B." Andrews, owner of the Andrews Paper Box Company, took ownership of a franchise in the South Atlantic League relocating the Single-A team to Chattanooga. The team adopted the name Lookouts in 1909 after a fan contest. The following year Andrews purchased the Double A Southern Association franchise from Little Rock and relocated them to Chattanooga. The team began playing on Andrews Field in the 1100 block of East 3rd Street, which would remain the site of their home stadium for close to a hundred years.

Joe Engel bought the Chattanooga Lookouts in 1926 and opened Engel Stadium in 1930 on the site of Andrews Field. The first game in the new stadium was played April 15, 1930, with the Lookouts beating the Atlanta Crackers 6-5 in front of approx. 16,000 fans.

In 1931, the New York Yankees played an exhibition game against the Lookouts. During the game, a 17-year-old girl named Jackie Mitchell pitched for the Lookouts and struck out Major League greats Lou Gehrig and Babe Ruth. Many reports of this story include a footnote claiming that a few days after the game, baseball commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis voided Mitchell's contract, claiming that baseball was "too strenuous" for women. This has been rebutted here, and directly contradicts a profile of Mitchell published a few months later. MLB didn't introduce a ban on contracts for female players until June 21, 1952 (which was repealed in 1992).

After winning the 1932 Southern Association pennant, the Lookouts won the Dixie Series, a postseason interleague championship between the champions of the Southern Association and the Texas League, defeating the Beaumont Exporters, 4–1, in the best-of-seven series.

During owner Joe Engel's tenure, the Lookouts won four championships – three with the Southern Association and a fourth with the South Atlantic League. Engel led a charge to own the Lookouts privately, with the help of several hundred fans as shareholders from 1938 to 1942. In 1939, as a privately owned franchise under coach Kiki Cuyler, the Lookouts claimed a championship. In 1943, the Lookouts played at Montgomery, Alabama's Cramton Bowl as the Montgomery Rebels after the Washington Senators moved the Lookouts from Chattanooga to Montgomery, some 235 mi away, citing a decline in attendance. (The original Montgomery Rebels team had folded due to World War II in 1943 and would return to Montgomery in 1946 in the now-defunct Southeastern League.) The Lookouts managed to move back to Chattanooga in December of that year after Engel organized a letter-writing campaign aimed at Clark Griffith, the owner of the Senators at the time.

The team, which plays in the Southern League, has been the Double-A affiliate of a major league ballclub since 1932. From 1988 through 2008, the Lookouts were the Double-A affiliate of the Cincinnati Reds. For the 2009 through 2014 seasons, the Los Angeles Dodgers served as the parent club. In affiliating with the Twins in 2015, the Lookouts rekindled a relationship with the franchise that, as the 1901–1960 edition of the Washington Senators, spent the longest period as its parent team.

It was announced on September 25, 2018, that the Lookouts would resume their affiliation with the Reds.

In conjunction with Major League Baseball's restructuring of Minor League Baseball in 2021, the Lookouts were organized into the Double-A South in which they continued as an affiliate of the Reds. In 2022, the Double-A South became known as the Southern League, the name historically used by the regional circuit prior to the 2021 reorganization.

On July 15 2024, the team and local officials broke ground on a new 115 million dollars stadium in the South Broad Street Community. The stadium will be constructed on the site of the former U.S. Pipe/Wheland Foundry. The stadium will be flanked by I-24 as it runs along Nickajack Lake.

Television and radio
All Chattanooga Lookouts games are televised on MiLB.TV. Since 2016, all games are broadcast on 96.1 The Legend. Larry Ward is the lead broadcaster. Lookouts games were broadcast on WDOD (1310 AM) until the 2011 season. From 2011 to 2015, games were broadcast on WALV-FM (105.1 FM, "ESPN Chattanooga"). Currently, all Lookouts games are broadcast on WLND 98.1 The Lake starting with the 2019 season.

Retired numbers

 * 26 – Dernell Stenson, OF, 2003