JUPITER, Fla. — It took one coach to hold the pitching machine so that it pointed down, another coach to feed the machine baseballs and two St. Louis Cardinals teammates/spotters to make sure Skip Schumaker wasn’t putting himself too far into harm’s way.

“Those grounders,” Schumaker said, “were coming in hot. Hot.“

The education of an infielder continued this morning on the backfields of Roger Dean Stadium with the help of a pitching machine dialed up almost as far as it could go. With one wheel spinning at “6″ and the other spinning at “10″, the pitching machine spit out what amounted to a 95-mph curveball. And, it did so pointed down so the first ricochet was about 10 feet in front of home plate. By the time the ball got to second base — quicker than you can read this next word … now! — it had such spin and such personality that Schumaker was either going to field it, watch is streak by on a bad hop or take one in the abs.

Don’t try this at home.

“How many will you get like that in a game?” said third baseman Troy Glaus, who was one of the teammates/spotters working in the field with Schumaker. “Probably not many. Maybe at third base, but even then not many. If you can field these, you can certainly field the routine ones. That’s why you do it.”

Fielding the 95-mph curveballs started Monday at the request of Schumaker, who was frustrated by getting caught in between hops on a grounder in a game. As several of the infielders and coaches said today, there is only so much a grounder off a fungo bat can help. And, it’s really difficult to duplicate the bad hops and short hops and speedy hops.

Bench coach Joe Pettini fired up the pitching machine to help.

“The chopper, the balls toward the bag — every grounder I see in the game I’m seeing for the first time,” Schumaker said. “Any ball hit to me is brand new. I wanted to get the toughest ball hit to me in practice, so that when it comes to the games all of this stuff is routine.”

They decided that the toughest grounder was the in-between hop — fired at decidedly un-game-like velocities. Brendan Ryan and Glaus both stood watch with Schumaker as he scooped and reached and flipped dozens of these “hot” grounders. Ryan, who grew up playing the position, also took some to show Schumaker how to read and react. Glaus, drawing on the instincts of a third base, talked with Schumaker about absorbing the bad hop into his torso — instead of snatching at it with the glove.

Schumaker just continued to work. Backhands. Forehands. Bad hops. Sizzlers. And about a dozen of what Glaus called, “(goshdarn) top-spinning rockets.” The entire purpose was to dial up Schumaker’s reactions and to force him to read the grounder and devote to it — eventually by instinct.

One onlooker noted that Schumaker is doing something that would usually start in instructional leagues, and here he is doing it, learning it at the major-league level with the help of every coach, every fellow infielder and the most wicked pitch that machine can spit at him.

“He’s such a good athlete, that it just is a matter of getting the repetition,” Glaus said. “Fungos are great, but it’s not like you’re going to be able to do those at game speed. And this — this is a little more than game speed.”

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