Chattanooga Lookouts

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The Chattanooga Lookouts are a minor league baseball team based in Chattanooga, Tennessee. They are named for nearby Lookout Mountain. The team, which plays in the Southern League, are the Double-A affiliate of the Minnesota Twins after having been affiliated with the Los Angeles Dodgers major-league club from 2009-2014. The Lookouts play in AT&T Field, located in Chattanooga. Opened in 2000, the stadium seats 6,340 fans. From 1930 through 1999, the Lookouts played at Engel Stadium, with a one-year break in Montgomery, Alabama's Cramton Bowl in 1943.

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History

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 refuted 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 MLB didn't introduce a ban on contracts for female players until June 21, 1952 (which was repealed in 1992).

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 miles (378 km) 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.

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Television and radio

All Chattanooga Lookouts games are televised live on MiLB.TV. Since 2016, all Chattanooga Lookouts 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").