The new owners, the Haas family, owners of Levi Strauss, were inexperienced in baseball. They gave Martin the additional title of player development director, with complete authority over the baseball side of the operation–effectively making him his own general manager. Martin brought his aggressive style of play, which was dubbed "Billyball" by a sportswriter early in the 1981 season. The name stuck; the A's later trademarked it. The A's were at in early May, Martin appeared on the cover of "Time" magazine, and the five-man rotation was on the cover of "Sports Illustrated". Mike Norris, Rick Langford, Matt Keough, Steve McCatty, and Brian Kingman had a cumulative ERA of 1.42. They also threw 94 complete games–far and away the most in the American League–in part because Martin did not trust his untested bullpen. He was applauded by baseball fans across the country even when he was kicked out of a game and suspended by the league for a week for kicking dirt on the umpire. The Oakland momentum was finally checked by the 1981 Major League Baseball strike, which shut down baseball for nearly two months midseason. The season was split into two halves, the division leaders at the time of the strike (in the AL West, the A's) to play the second-half winners (the Royals) in a special division series. The A's won in three straight games to face the Yankees in the League Championship Series. The opportunity to beat the Yankees meant much to Martin, and Steinbrenner, seeing the Oakland success, was privately stating that he might have been too quick to fire Martin after the marshmallow salesman incident. But the veteran New York lineup and pitching staff was able to dominate the A's as the Yankees swept the series in three games.