It included the third Major League Baseball expansion of the decade, with the Kansas City Royals, Montreal Expos, San Diego Padres, and Seattle Pilots each beginning play this season.
The strike zone was reduced to the area over home plate between the armpits and the top of the knees of a batter.
[2] A save became an official MLB statistic to reward relief pitchers who preserve a lead while finishing a game.
Senator Stuart Symington of Missouri was irate over the American League's approval of Kansas City Athletics owner Charles O. Finley's arrangement to move his team to Oakland, California, for the 1968 season.
Symington drew up legislation to remove baseball's anti-trust exemption, and threatened to pursue its passage if Kansas City did not get a new team.
A consortium led by Dewey Soriano and William Daley won the bidding for the Seattle franchise, and named it the Seattle Pilots, a salute to the harbor pilots of the Puget Sound maritime industry and to the city's place in the aviation industry.
Charles Bronfman, owner of Seagram, won the bidding for the Montreal franchise, naming them the Expos, in honor of the World's Fair that year.
The AL was divided purely along geographic lines, but when it came to assign divisions in the NL, the Chicago Cubs and St. Louis Cardinals insisted on being placed in the same division with the New York Mets and Philadelphia Phillies, on the basis that a schedule with more games with eastern teams would create a more lucrative schedule.
Even though the Pilots managed to avoid losing 100 games (they finished 64–98, last in the AL West), financial trouble would lead to a battle for team control, ending with bankruptcy and the sale of the team to Bud Selig and its move to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, as the Milwaukee Brewers for the 1970 season.
The legal fallout of the battle would lead eventually to another round of expansion for the AL in the 1977 season, with Seattle getting a new team called the Mariners.
With the two sides at an impasse, at the beginning of the year the union called on players to refuse to sign contracts until the issue was resolved.
[5] The owners did not change their position, so the players' union called for members to boycott spring training the following month if the issue had not been resolved by then.
After the union rejected the owners' offer of a higher yet still fixed contribution on February 17, the day before spring training was to begin, 400 players refused to report.
The owners expected the situation to resolve itself soon in their favor, since they usually lost money on training camps while the players were foregoing their pay in the meantime.