The pallbearers were assembling

When he got to Baltimore and found the time, Howie was going to fifa 15 coins write down what he wanted to say, and then commit it to memory so that he would display extempo- raneous eloquence in his last public appearance.

In the meantime, he tried to pretend that he was not dwelling on what everyone knew. The pallbearers were assembling. Not only the columnists from the Plain Dealer and the Akron Beacon Journal, but, as well, the lead columnist of the Columbus Dispatch had signed onto the press manifest this trip, ready to dress up his obituary on the spot for the enlightenment of central Ohio fans. After all, a road trip offered the kind of time- table general managers preferred for these proceedings. Fire the manager away from home. Let an interim man- ager––in this case, the team’s trusty old reliable, Spencer “Frosty” Westerfield, the bench coach––handle the next series, in Chicago, and then have the new man on hand, prepared to assume command––“take the helm,” as the papers would have it––when the team returned to Cleveland, ready to start fresh, turn a new leaf, salvage the season, restore the damage that he, Howie Traveler, had indisputably done.

Never was anything so pat. So Howie just waited for Moncrief to fly in from Cleveland and fire him. Of course, everybody knows that baseball managers are, as it is written in stone, hired to be fired, but this was cold comfort when you were the manager in question and this was your time to be eighty-sixed.

O’Reilly, one of the newspaper beat men who liked Howie and drank with him sometimes, told him that Diaz was already in Cleveland, working out his deal. Nobody could locate Diaz, but O’Reilly said they knew he was there. This figured. Even when the Indians had hired Howie, the season before last, there had been a lot of speculation that Diaz would get the job instead. Diaz was surely Jay Alcazar’s man, and if Juan Francisco Alcazar, El Jefe––The Chief––could not put out his best for Howie (which this season he evidently chose not to) then it would be just a matter of time before Diaz was brought in. So this is where it stood, Diaz working out the details of his contract, whereupon, that buttoned up, Moncrief would pop over to Baltimore, via South- west Air, and, with the saddest, most sympathetic expression he could manage to put on, basset-faced, he would tell Howie that he was toast.