The Education of a Ballplayer : Hart’s John Aguilar Will Attend College Next Year After Receiving a Lesson About Pro Baseball

The conversation between John Aguilar and himself is closed. No more wondering or words of reassurance.

Aguilar, a senior shortstop for Hart High and The Times’ All-Valley player of the year for 1992, will finish his high school career Saturday in the Bernie Milligan game at Cal State Northridge. Then he will spend the summer working for a plumbing service and lifting weights.

He will not sign a professional baseball contract. Nor will he attend a Division I college. Instead, he is headed for College of the Canyons.

“I just look at it as a year when things didn’t go my way,” Aguilar said. “So, I’m just going to go off to college. I figure, maybe it’s better to go to college and get my education.”

It has taken Aguilar nearly three weeks of long walks and lengthy talks with himself to come to terms with the anger and disappointment of being bypassed earlier this month in baseball’s amateur draft. But slowly, his wounded psyche is healing.

“I’ve been kind of bitter,” he said. “When you have scouts come out to your practices and they have you hit with wooden bats a couple of times, and run for them, and then they tell your parents and you that if you run a seven-flat 60 that the odds of being drafted high are going to be good, and then you run a 6.9. . . . I figured I had it wrapped.”

That Aguilar went undrafted has surprised those who have watched him emerge this season.

Aguilar (6-foot, 165 pounds), a right-handed batter with a lightening-quick swing, led Hart in virtually every offensive category. He batted .457 with a school-record nine home runs--seven to the opposite field--and 38 runs batted in.

He had 37 hits--18 for extra bases--and walked 20 times. His on-base percentage was .563, his slugging percentage .951. Aguilar, the Foothill League’s co-most valuable player, led Hart to a 15-0 league record and into the second round of the Southern Section 5-A Division playoffs.

He hit only four home runs as a junior while striking out 17 times in 79 at-bats. If improvement was to come, Aguilar decided, he needed a stern talking-to on a regular basis. And he knew just the guy to deliver it.

“The difference this year is that I was more patient,” he said. “I just talked to myself when I was up at the plate: ‘Never swing at the first pitch. Never swing at balls in the dirt or balls up high.’ ”

He might have added: Never listen to professional scouts.

Throughout the season, Aguilar was scrutinized by the Dodgers, Angels and San Francisco Giants. He said he was given every indication that they liked what they observed.

On one occasion, scouts from the Dodgers and Angels had Aguilar remain after practice to see how well he ran and hit.

“He hit five of 19 out of the park,” Rick Aguilar said of his son. “They said they would give John a good report, and then nothing. (After the draft), one of the scouts told me he didn’t know what the hell happened.”

Hart Coach Bud Murray also is perplexed.

“I don’t understand it,” he said. “His overall speed is not good when you talk about baseball players, but he has good quickness and he has a quick bat. (Scouts) liked his bat. I really thought he’d be a seventh- or eighth-round pick.”

Why was Aguilar overlooked? Perhaps he is too slow, too old or too skinny. Or some combination of the three.

For openers, Aguilar, who transferred from Glendale to Hart before his junior year, recently turned 19, while the majority of high school draft choices are 17 or 18. Aguilar was held back a year after transferring from a public school to a Catholic school as a first-grader.

“When scouts look at a kid, they try to project what he’s going to be like in four or five years,” Murray said. “If they’re 17 years old, they have a lot of maturing to do. If they’re 19, scouts have to wonder, ‘Have they peaked out? Are they as good as they’re going to get?’ ”

Throughout the season, Aguilar attracted the interest of Clemson and USC, although their interest has ebbed since. Rick Aguilar admits telling some scouts not to bother drafting his son unless it was in the early rounds.

“I wanted him to go to school anyway,” Rick Aguilar said. “I told the Angels and the Dodgers: ‘10th or 12th round, I won’t let him sign.’ ”

Finally, at 165 pounds, Aguilar, by his own admission, could stand a bit of bulk. “I want to get, I guess you would say, chunky,” he said.

Aguilar’s size, perhaps, contributed to his obscurity. However, he has deceptive power, Murray said.

“I remember two or three ballgames when he hit one the other way that were long outs that would have been out in most yards,” Murray said.

The most memorable of Aguilar’s home runs came in May, when he blasted his eighth of the season to break the school record.

At this point, memories are all Aguilar has to show for his senior year. “I feel good about it,” he said. “I just feel puzzled. You look at receiving MVP of your team and co-MVP of your league and you’re player of the year by The Times and you’re thinking, ‘How can I receive all this and not even have a shot of going somewhere?’ ”