[1] The strike began on June 12 and forced the cancellation of 713 games (or 38 percent of the Major League schedule) in the middle of the regular season.
The executive board of the Major League Baseball Players Association voted unanimously to strike on May 29 due to the unresolved issue of free agent compensation.
At issue during the seven-week-long negotiations was the owners demanding compensation for losing a free agent player to another team.
Major League Baseball resumed on August 9 with the All-Star Game in Cleveland's Municipal Stadium.
The All-Star Game, which was originally scheduled to be held on July 14, now served as a prelude to play resuming on August 10.
Despite the disgruntled fans, the All-Star Game, which was played on a Sunday instead of the usual Tuesday, had its largest attendance (72,086), due to the large seating capacity of Municipal Stadium.
So on August 6, the owners decided to split the 1981 season into two halves, with the first-place teams from each half in each division (or a wild card team if the same club won both halves) meeting in a best-of-five divisional playoff series (this playoff round, known as the Division Series was only used this season; it was not until 13 years later in 1994 that the round became permanent in MLB [it was first played in 1995, as the 1994 season ended prematurely because of another strike], when the league introduced the three-division format).
The split-season idea as put into practice (although garnering the league more playoff revenue) seemed to cheapen the results of the regular season.
An Orioles fan, J. Thomas Codd, pointed out, the arrangement would give a team with a good overall record an incentive to lose games against the first-half winner to help a division rival win both halves.
Facing a playoff no matter their finish in the second half, the first-half winners lacked incentive (as opposed to the minor leagues, where if the same team did win both halves it was given a bye into the next round) to repeat, and finished the second half of the season with a composite record of only three games above .500.
Tommy John of the AL East–winning Yankees stated, "With the first-half divisional 'title' wrapped up, we lost our intensity.
Notably, the format allowed the second-half National League East champion Montreal Expos to make the playoffs, the only time the Expos franchise made the postseason in its 36-year stay in Montreal and its only postseason appearance of any kind until 2012, long after the team became the Washington Nationals.
Ironically, the next time there was a significant players' strike, 13 years later in 1994, the Expos were the team most hurt by the season's abrupt end.