Who they gonna call? Mr. Baseball

It’s always flattering when someone values your knowledge enough to ask you to be on a committee.

That isn’t always a good thing because it takes a commitment of time and energy to do the job well. When it involves your expertise and something you’re passionate about, that’s a different matter.

Then it’s hard to say no.

Thus, I am a charter member of the Rio Rancho Sports Advisory Council, I have served on selection committees to hire an athletic director and head football coach at Rio Rancho High School and, most recently, I was asked to serve on a committee to determine members for the Albuquerque Professional Baseball Hall of Fame.

Today, that’s a small hall: Tommy Lasorda, who led the 1972 Dukes to the Pacific Coast League championship in his only year at the helm.

He went to Los Angeles to coach for Walter Alston in 1973, and stuck around long enough to take over the reins of the Dodgers.

Lasorda was inducted last summer as part of the Triple-A All-Star Game festivities here.

Albuquerque Isotopes general manager John Traub wants to continue the celebration of great players, managers, executives and media members in the Duke City, and thus the formation of the hall of fame I mentioned earlier.

It’s a distinguished list of committee members, including a couple former Dukes players, former broadcasters Connie Alexander and Mike Roberts, and others.

At the initial meeting, there was a lengthy discussion about just how to proceed, how we’d arrive at nominees, and how we’d vote on the candidates, hopefully to add “famers” on an annual basis.

The committee members left the meeting, determined to send some nominees to Traub in time for the next meeting on May 21.

I received the list of second-year nominees a week later. There were 77 nominees, including the trio of names (Kevin Kennedy, Mike Scioscia and Paul Konerko) that I had submitted, along with about 40 names that another member had submitted.

The list runs from A (Billy Ashley and Pedro Astacio) to Z (Geoff Zahn), and includes two teams, Lasorda’s 1972 squad and the 1981 team, which won the Pacific Coast League championship and is widely regarded as one of the best minor league teams of all time.

You know what else is on this list? Memories.

Most of the names conjure up great memories for the committee members, and because I’ve lived in New Mexico since 1975 and went to more than 1,000 Dukes games, most of the nominees are familiar to me.

I have baseball cards of almost all of them, autographs of many of them, and some game-used baseball bats of some.

At the May 21 meeting, it was decided that the 2008 class will be made up of former player-manager Hersh Martin, former manager Del Crandall, former G.M. Pat McKernan, 1981 Dukes star Mike Marshall, executives Tom Bolack/John McMullen and long-time journalist (KOAT-TV and Albuquerque Journal) J.D. Kailer.

If you’re a long-time fan of the Dukes and Albuquerque baseball in general, feel free to send me some names you’d like to see considered — and possibly added to the list of nominees n for next year.

Send ‘em to me at gherron@rrobserver.com.