PHOENIX — One week after games were supposed to start and almost three weeks after Spring Training was supposed to begin, there were finally Giants on a baseball field.

While the big leaguers remain locked out, the Minor League spring training officially opened on Saturday at the freshly-completed Papago Park complex for the 173 players the Giants have in their organization.

There’s no Joey Bart, Heliot Ramos or Sean Hjelle, as all are on the 40-man roster and, thus, locked out from any baseball activities with the Giants. But several other top prospects are able to participate, led by Marco Luciano, the team’s consensus No. 1 prospect.

On the first day, Luciano took two at-bats in a simulated game, going 1-for-2 with a lasered single to left field his first time up.

And now over on Candlestick, Marco Luciano rips a single to left-center. pic.twitter.com/i12yZVyh12

— Alex Simon (@AlexSimonSports) March 5, 2022

Luciano said he’s actually been with the team for over a month already, participating in mini-camps with the Giants in the run-up to minor league camp opening.

“I think everything is going well,” Luciano said through Spanish language translator Erwin Higueros. “Everything is going according to plan.”

Luciano is MLB.com’s fifth-best prospect in all of baseball, while Baseball America has ranked No. 17 and ESPN has him No. 30. In a world without a lockout, Luciano surely would have been invited to big league camp and worked with Gabe Kapler and the big league coaching staff. Kapler was in attendance on Saturday, but watching from the stands.

Instead, the minor league coaches ran the day, meaning Luciano got to work with Double-A Richmond manager Dennis Pelfrey, who was his manager at instructional league in 2020 and in High-A Eugene for the last month-and-a-half of 2021. And after two years, Pelfrey thinks very highly of the 20-year-old.

“[He’s a] confident kid, carries himself confidently. Around his teammates, he’s very happy, fun to be around,” Pelfrey said. “You get to see him kind of be a kid. But when he’s on the field, he’s very determined in what he’s doing.”

As a 19-year-old, Luciano tore up Single-A San Jose, batting .278 with 18 home runs and 57 RBI. He also displayed good plate discipline, walking 38 times and striking out 68 times in 308 plate appearances.

The strong performance earned him a call-up to High-A Eugene on Aug. 4, 2021, where he spent the rest of the season all the way through the Emeralds’ championship. Luciano struggled against the advanced pitching, batting .217 with one homer and 14 RBI, and also striking out 54 times (with only 10 walks) in 145 plate appearances.

“In Eugene, they’re more consistent. They know the strike zone,” Luciano said. “Not at like a lower level, where they miss the zone, but in Eugene, it seems like they know exactly what they want to do.”

Pelfrey added, “There is a lot of pressure based on [him] being who he is, but he did a fantastic job handling that. You can look at the stats and say he struggled a little bit, but I think a lot of players really embrace that because you learn a lot faster. If we had a month left in the season last year in Eugene, I think you would’ve seen a guy that would’ve tore up the High-A league.”

It was also his first-ever full professional baseball season, after only playing in 47 games stateside in 2019 and no official games in 2020 (though he was at the alternate site in Sacramento). Luciano also acknowledged fatigue was a factor in the drop-off but that he has to learn to deal with it because it “comes with the job.”

Pelfrey also thought transitioning from the grass field in San Jose to the turf field in Eugene didn’t help with the fatigue factor, either. And while the struggles only exacerbated questions some prospect evaluators have had about his long-term ability to play shortstop, Pelfrey thinks otherwise.

“The arm plays, the glove plays,” Pelfrey said. “I think there’s going to be zero issues if the Giants are going to keep him at short the rest of his career.”

Luciano said he’s been working on more cardio and running to make sure his body “wouldn’t resent the season.” Though he did well in the Arizona Fall League, batting .253 in 21 games with three homers, the step-up to facing higher-quality pitching resonated with him into the offseason — and have pushed him to be ready for this year.

“Those are the challenges that I like,” Luciano said. “I know that I have to learn and that’s what I like. I like to compete, because I know that they are doing the same thing.”

That mentality is obvious to his two-time manager in Pelfrey, who says he “100%” expects to have Luciano with him a third time at some point this year in Richmond.

“It was fantastic to see how he works,” Pelfrey said. “I think what gets lost is how he works and how determined he is to be really good. That, in itself, takes care of the development, really.

“I really think you’re going to see Luciano blossom.”

What can you see at Papago?

Among the other notable top prospects currently working out at the Minor League Facility include outfielders Luis Matos, left-handed pitcher Kyle Harrison and their last three first-round picks: outfielder Hunter Bishop (2019), catcher Patrick Bailey (2020) and right-handed pitcher Will Bednar (2021).

Currently, the minor league facility is closed to fans, though the Giants anticipate allowing fans in once Minor League spring games begin sometime around March 15. But there is a way fans who come out in the next week can see what’s happening.

But you might need some hiking boots and binoculars.

The Giants complex is on a small sliver of Papago Park on the north side of the corner of McDowell Road and 64th Street in Phoenix. But the vast majority of the park is south of McDowell and has extensive desert hiking trails.

If you’re willing to go on a bit of a hike, there are two Papago Park trails that fans can hike to access the northeast corner of the butte and look down on the baseball fields: the Big Butte Loop and the Double Butte Loop. From there, fans can see all six ballfields with ease … from a distance. Fans can also access the best viewpoints via the Papago Amphitheater on McDowell Road, but parking on the side of McDowell there is extremely limited.

The minor league complex was built in 1988 and was the home of the A’s minor league facility from then until Oakland moved back to Hohokam Park in Mesa in 2015. The city of Phoenix leased the land to Scottsdale, who is subleasing to the Giants, who have poured millions into a renovation project to modernize and expand the facility.

The Giants had their minor league facility at Indian School Park (on the corner of Camelback and Hayden in Scottsdale) for decades, but this year marks the first full, official spring at Papago. It’s in the exact opposite direction as Scottsdale Stadium, but Papago is only half a mile farther away (2.5 miles) from Scottsdale Stadium than Indian School Park (two miles).

The organization added their own custom touch to two fields in particular: the first two fields closest to the 64th Street entrance have the same dimensions as the Giants’ two San Francisco homes. There’s the Candlestick field, adorned with logos on its outfield fence from the team’s early years in San Francisco.

And then there’s the Oracle Park field, with a 24-foot-high tarped fence in right field and the 415-foot triple’s alley. And, for at least this first day, the wind was blowing in from that field’s outfield on an overcast day, so it even had an Oracle Park-feel to it weather-wise, too.