Cocoa Rookie League

The Cocoa Rookie League, based in Cocoa and Melbourne, Florida, was an American minor professional baseball league that operated for one season, . One of the first spring training-complex-based circuits, it was graded at the Rookie-league level, which is the lowest level of minor league baseball.
Instruction-driven league for youngsters.
Its four teams were owned and operated by Major League Baseball teams seeking a means to develop 18- and 19-year-old players who had just signed their first professional contracts. The contraction in leagues and teams during the 1950s and early 1960s had caused a major reorganization of the structure of minor league baseball in , and the two Florida rookie circuits created in 1964 (the Sarasota Rookie League along the Gulf Coast was the other) were founded to offer an entry-level league for inexperienced players who might struggle in the other Rookie-level circuits, the Appalachian League and the Pioneer League. The complex-based teams charged no admission (individual attendance records were not kept) and the emphasis was on baseball fundamentals instruction for the young players.
The four teams — operated by the Detroit Tigers, Houston Colt .45s, Minnesota Twins and New York Mets — competed against each other in a league schedule of over 50 games, with the Twins' entry — led by 19-year-old Rod Carew, a future member of the Baseball Hall of Fame — taking the CRL pennant by five games over the Mets' club. Total attendance for the year was only 1,683. The Cocoa Rookie League folded after the season, while the Sarasota-based circuit became the basis for the Gulf Coast League, which still plays today. A successor to the CRL, the Florida East Coast League, operated in 1972 in Cocoa and Melbourne.