The Gulf Coast League is a minor league baseball league which operates in Florida. It is a Rookie League, with a season running from mid-June to late August. The season is 60 games long and teams in the league are divided into three divisions, East, North and South. The playoffs pair the division winner with the best record against one wild card team, and the other two division winners meet in a one-game playoff. The winners meet in a best-of-3 game series for the Gulf Coast League championship.
GCL teams generally play at the minor league spring training complexes of their parent major league clubs, and are uniformly owned by those parent clubs. The teams generate little if any revenue, as admission is not charged and no concessions are operated. As almost all of the games are played in the heat and humidity of Florida summer afternoons, very few show up to watch the average contest. GCL games are perhaps the least competitive of all minor league games, as most of the players were just drafted in that year's entry draft (2–3 weeks before the season's start) and are there to develop skills under their employer's tutelage rather than (necessarily) to win games or entertain fans.
GCL teams are not referred to by their home city, but simply by their parent club's name, and the prefix "GCL" or "Gulf Coast" if necessary to differentiate between them and another club sharing the nickname. Some of these teams share stadiums with their club's High-A affiliate in the Florida State League, which can lead to confusion, as FSL teams do use the city name (e.g. the Dunedin Blue Jays, three levels up from the GCL Blue Jays, who also play in Dunedin).
The league was founded in 1964 as the Sarasota Rookie League with four teams playing in Sarasota. The League expanded in 1965 and changed its name to the Florida Rookie League. It adopted its current name, Gulf Coast League, for the 1966 season.
Read more about Gulf Coast League: Current Teams, Previous Teams
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