The Cocoa Rookie League, based in Cocoa and Melbourne, Florida, was an American minor professional baseball league that operated for one season, 1964.
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.
[1] The complex-based teams charged no admission (individual attendance records were not kept)[2] 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.
A successor to the CRL, the Florida East Coast League, operated in 1972 in Cocoa and Melbourne.