HIGH SCHOOL BASEBALL PREVIEW : EAST VALLEY LEAGUE : Poly’s Pair of Aces : Nealon, Lymberopoulos Just as Effective as More Celebrated Woodfin at Sylmar

Professional baseball scouts armed with radar guns already are gravitating toward Olonzo Woodfin, the Sylmar High fireballer who last season struck out 166 batters in 100 innings. Nearly 30 scouts flocked to the school last week to catch Woodfin’s first preseason appearance of 1988.

Meanwhile, Poly’s Greg Nealon and Nick Lymberopoulos could have spent practice eating cheeseburgers at the fast food stand across the street from the Sun Valley school and no one except their teammates would have missed them.

Yet Nealon and Lymberopoulos pitched Poly to the City Section 4-A Division final last season as juniors. They are proof that success in high school is not enough for scouts to swallow their tobacco juice in excitement. Like spectators hanging around a drag-race strip, scouts are impressed by speed.

The Poly pair throw in the 75-85 m.p.h. range--fast enough to impress college coaches but nothing special to professional scouts--and both throw at least three pitches with accuracy.

“From a pro point of view, scouts want Olonzo, but college scouts want to know about grades,” said Mike Young, a part-time scout for the Chicago Cubs. “College scouts love Olonzo, but they don’t know if they can get him,” because of his grades.

Getting a college scholarship is not a question of grades for Nealon, a left-hander with control, and Lymberopoulos, a right-hander with command of a knuckleball. They must impress recruiters with their pitching.

Nealon performed better than Woodfin this winter on a Cubs scout team coached by Young. The team challenged several Division I colleges, including Loyola Marymount and USC.

“Olonzo was just a thrower and he didn’t have as much success as Greg,” Young said. “Greg got hit more, but Olonzo made more mistakes.”

Woodfin’s weakness when he arrived at Sylmar--a lack of control, according to Spartans Coach John Klitsner--rarely if ever affects Nealon. “Greg is always around the plate,” Poly Coach Jerry Cord said. “Kids will make some contact, but they won’t be hurting him because his pitches are in such great locations.”

Nealon often records an eye-popping 6-to-1 strike-ball ratio in games. Woodfin’s ratio is usually about 3 to 1. And if asked about statistics, Lymberopoulos pulls them from his cerebral computer bank.

“I keep them all in my head,” he says. And that can have its saving graces: The 6-1, 200-pound senior nearly had 0.21 runs falsely added to his 1987 earned-run average of 1.64 because of an unearned run charged to him in the City final, a 5-4 loss to Canoga Park. “I got mad when I saw that the next day,” he said.

Neither Nealon nor Lymberopoulos would object to attention from professional scouts, but it is clear to them that Woodfin is in a class by himself. “I’m just not that good,” Lymberopoulos said. “He makes our hitters look foolish.”

Said Nealon: “I don’t really deserve the attention Woodfin gets. He’s a more dominating pitcher.”

Nealon’s modesty, combined with his studious approach to pitching, makes him seem older than 17. He was the starter as a sophomore in Poly’s semifinal playoff loss to Granada Hills.

“That’s the only game in my life I’d like to remake,” Nealon said. “If only I knew what I know now in terms of how to pitch.”

Much of Nealon’s education came under Young’s tutelage. The Cubs scout team played 11 doubleheaders on Saturdays beginning in late September. Nealon “was there every weekend,” Young said. “He always wanted to work.”

Nealon (5-11, 165 pounds) learned that shortening his stride enabled him to make his curve drop more sharply, and he developed a split-fingered fastball in lieu of a changeup.

Nealon struck out 50 in 81 innings en route to a 10-2 record last season. His most memorable win was a 2-1 complete game in the quarterfinals against El Camino Real.

“I was so glad I got through that,” he said, “because I had lost in the semis the year before.”

Cord said Nealon’s 1.93 ERA in 1987 was largely a product of his ability to keep a level head.

“Greg has always been very mature mentally,” Cord said. “He is good for complete games. He doesn’t throw a lot of pitches and he is really a student of the game.”

With the Cubs scout team, Nealon pitched against the likes of UCLA, Pepperdine and Loyola.

“Anything close they’d mash,” he said. “You really couldn’t get anything past them, and in a way it hurts your ego. But in a way it doesn’t because now I’ve played against the big teams and I didn’t do that bad.”

Cord thinks Nealon could offer immediate left-handed help to a major college team in need of a control pitcher but that Lymberopoulos could use two years’ worth of junior college experience before joining a Division I school.

“Nick is going to be a much later developer than Greg,” Cord says. “Nick is still grasping for his pitches and experimenting, which is good. You’ve got to find out how the ball moves best.”

Something that makes Lymberopoulos especially tough to hit is his ability to throw a fastball, curve and change from all arm angles. He also developed a knuckleball last season that he says has become a two-strike pitch.

“It’s good because hitters can’t really get their barrel on it,” Lymberopoulos said.

Batters see a variety of breaking pitches when Lymberopoulos is on the mound. “I mainly come with junk,” he said.

But Cord says much of the junk hangs and that a tailing fastball is actually Lymberopoulos’ best pitch.

Both hard stuff and junk worked for Lymberopoulos last season when he was 9-1 with 36 strikeouts in 59 innings.

This season he expects more velocity on his fastball, which will help in the big games in which Lymberopoulos especially likes to pitch. “My knee will sometimes shake from the pressure,” he said, “but I want to have everyone looking at me.”

Against Sylmar, that probably won’t happen.

“I don’t think there is any question that eyes will be on Woodfin this year,” Cord said. “I’m sure we’ll see him three times, but the Spartans are going to see our best three times also.”