Major League Baseball's spring training and regular season starting dates remain unknown amid the ongoing lockout.
That's not the case for the Chattanooga Lookouts, the Class AA affiliate of the Cincinnati Reds.
"At this point, we're excited that we're pretty much back to what we would call our standard operating procedures," Reds vice president of player development Shawn Pender said. "The minor league aspect to this is really going to go off the same way that it always has."
This past December, just days after the previous collective bargaining agreement expired and the lockout began, Major League Baseball announced it would be committed to a full 2022 minor league season. The Lookouts will start their 138-game schedule April 8 at Tennessee before opening their home slate April 12 against Birmingham.
As for the Reds minor leaguers who could be starting out with the Lookouts, the first full day of spring workouts will be next Thursday in Goodyear, Arizona. Pender said there was an early camp with 64 players and that roughly 100 more are in the process of joining them.
"Our first official spring training game is on the 17th," Pender said. "Depending on weather and injuries and the availability of pitching, the plan is to play 12 to 15 games. The Chattanooga group will start to play on the 17th against the Cleveland Guardians, who are our neighbors here exclusively.
"We would then leave to come to Chattanooga in early April."
Not only are MLB players sitting out right now but so are members of organizational 40-man rosters who competed in the minors last season.
"It will be a work in progress, and obviously we're all awaiting from the commissioner's office what will transpire once a CBA is signed," Pender said. "We're just operating as if we don't have access to any of those players, and we're going to operate to send our players to Triple-A, Double-A and down based on the minor league invites that we've got coming presently."
March 25 is a tentative target date when Pender will have the Lookouts roster formulated to a certain extent. With Major League Baseball now responsible financially for the housing of its minor league players throughout the season, Pender said it's crucial to have a decent idea by then given that there will be 28 to 30 players at each level of the developmental chain.
The housing responsibility may be the biggest difference this spring facing Pender and his staff, but what could be pleasantly familiar is a setting that likely will evoke the days before COVID-19. The outbreak of the coronavirus in March 2020 wound up wiping out the entire season for the Lookouts and every other minor league participant.
"Almost all of our protocols that we had to work through last season have been removed, at least for the time being, with the hopes that there isn't another variant or something that a state or national entity or Major League Baseball would change," Pender said. "We're free to operate here at the complex as we did before. Obviously we still do a lot of intake testing when folks arrive, and anyone who doesn't have a vaccination to this point still has to be masked up.
"Overall, though, we're pretty much back to normal."
Contact David Paschall at dpaschall@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6524. Follow him on Twitter @DavidSPaschall.