Who's keeping score? For 40 years, it's been Hall of Famer Herron

There are some jobs in life where praise and appreciation are hard to come by — the kinds of occupations where you’re only noticed when you make a mistake or somebody wants to tell you you got something wrong.

For the past 40 years, Gary Herron’s side gig as an official scorer for both the Albuquerque Dukes (1983-2000) and now the Albuquerque Isotopes (2003 to present) pretty much fit that bill.

Not on Saturday.

After nearly 1,700 games as the official scorer of professional baseball games in Albuquerque since 1983, and who knows how many errors scored or hits awarded that angered minor league players and managers through the years, the longtime local sports journalist will be honored for his work and inducted into the Albuquerque Professional Baseball Hall of Fame.

“I was told one time I was the toughest scorer in the Pacific Coast League, and I interpreted that to be the fairest because I wasn’t giving home calls for the Dukes,” said Herron, who is the sports editor of the Rio Rancho Observer in addition to his fairly regular work as the Isotopes official scorekeeper.

Herron, who moved to New Mexico from Michigan in 1975, is one of two men being inducted this year into the Albuquerque Professional Baseball Hall of Fame, a project of the Isotopes. He and Isotopes pitching great John Ely will be enshrined during a pregame ceremony on Saturday night ahead of the team’s special Dukes Retro Night game.

A lifelong lover of baseball since scoring games as a young boy in Detroit, Herron starting as a part time scorer for the Dukes in 1983 and took over as the primary scorer in 1985. When the Isotopes started up as a new franchise in 2003, Herron was again scoring games.

By his tally, he’s scored 1,004 Dukes games from 1983 to 2000 and 650-plus games with the Isotopes since 2003. And while he’s always quick with a joke, he takes his responsibility as an official scorer seriously.

“There’s times I had trouble falling asleep wondering if I made the right call, because I want it to be right,” he said. “I can harken back to a game when Rusty Meacham was pitching for Kansas City (in the mid 1990s) and I deprived him of a no hitter, calling hit instead of an error. And then the next day I said, I hope you didn’t mind that call. And he said, ‘No, it was okay.’

“There were other times back in the old Sports Stadium, there was a guy coming up behind me with a bat — one time that happened. Another guy who said it was a racist thing one time. And another time I really got F-bombed by an Isotopes reliever after a game.”

Nevertheless, it’s been a dream fulfilled to be a part of the game he loves.

“I am honored, surprised and humbled by the honor, Herron said.