I noticed that Baseball reference had their first game as:
Saturday, April 15, 1972
Texas Rangers (0) @ California Angels (1)
And the teams didn't play 162 games either.
So I looked it up and found:
1972 was affected by a players' strike over pension and salary arbitration. The strike erased the first week and a half of the season, and the Leagues decided to just excise the lost portion of the season with no makeups.
As a result, an uneven number of games were lost by each team; some as few as six, some as many as nine.
The lack of makeups, even when they affected the playoffs, led to the Boston Red Sox losing the American League East by half a game to the Detroit Tigers.
1972 marked the first year for the Texas Rangers, who had moved to Arlington from Washington, D.C. (where they played as the Washington Senators) after the 1971 season.
The team was one of the worst ever fielded by the franchise, losing 100 games for the first time since 1964. Manager Ted Williams hated it in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, and resigned at the end of the season.
To make room for the Rangers in the American League West Division, one of the teams already in that division would have to switch to the East Division.
Technically, both the Chicago White Sox and the Milwaukee Brewers were the easternmost teams in the West Division, but only one of them could move.
It was decided that Milwaukee, as the newer franchise, would make the move.
The Brewers and White Sox would again become divisional rivals in 1994 with the formation of the American League Central, but this would last only through 1997,
when Milwaukee transferred to the National League.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1972_M...aseball_season