Roger Kahn

The list of today's most compelling and best-selling authors is growing for the second annual Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, to be held April 19 and 20 at UCLA. Last year's festival drew about 75,000 people.

Mickey Mantle tells great stories. This could be the predictable and natural result of a drinking life, of bending elbows, swilling booze and closing bars with the boys. Alas, so is cancer of the liver, which has the Mick today in a sick bed, fighting for his life. One day in 1956, Mickey and the mighty Yankees were playing the lowly Kansas City Athletics, a couple of whom had just been brushed back by the New York pitcher.

Good Enough to Dream by Roger Kahn (Doubleday: $16.95; 351 pp.) At first you may say you have better things to do than to follow the Utica Blue Sox in their pursuit of the 1983 pennant in the New York-Penn League. But you may change your mind. Roger Kahn, who has been writing mostly about baseball these 30 years, decided one day to buy the Utica team. He had several objectives. He would learn things about the system of baseball from a point of view he had never taken before.

It was erroneously reported that Al Campanis' appearance on ABC-TV's "Nightline" program Monday was as a last-minute substitute guest for Don Newcombe, whose plane was delayed. "The idea was to have all three--Al Campanis, Roger Kahn and Don Newcombe--on the program to talk about Jackie Robinson," said Ted Koppel, the show's host. "It is not true that Al was a last-minute replacement."

I thank the L.A. Times and Roger Kahn for the commentary on Gil Hodges [May 26]. I wonder why this argument wasn't made in 1983, the last year Hodges was eligible on the Hall of Fame ballot. Once Orlando Cepeda and Tony Perez went in, Hodges should have gotten an automatic pass (like Tom Lasorda). I have never been to Cooperstown but would love to go see Hodges' plaque there. Raul Sanchez Whittier Kahn is right on target in his position that Hodges should be enshrined in baseball's Hall of Fame.

Title: "A Flame of Pure Fire: Jack Dempsey and the Roaring '20s." Author: Roger Kahn. Price: $28. When Jack Dempsey died at 87 in 1983, he took with him an era of American history. He'd begun his life as a Colorado/Utah mining camp hobo, roustabout, miner, cowboy and whorehouse bouncer. Within a decade, he was the most electrifying sports figure in America.

Pete Rose admits he gambled on baseball games in the pages of a new book to be released Thursday, an unnamed source said in Saturday's editions of a Philadelphia newspaper. Rose, who has spent the last 14 years denying he bet on baseball despite evidence to the contrary, reportedly makes a full confession in "My Prison Without Bars."