Pepper, who is best known as The Real Big Pupi on Instagram (@therealbigpupi), is a multi-sport, left-pawed athlete based in Marblehead.
This spunky, 9-year-old Australian Cattle Dog first went viral for playing baseball in 2022, but she has dabbled in plenty of other sports as well, including badminton, cricket, curling, hockey, pickleball, ping pong, soccer, surfing, and swimming.
According to Pepper’s social media manager, Dan Martin, who has known her since she was just a puppy, Pepper learned how to play baseball simply because a friend of theirs joked that there was no way Pepper’s dad, Dave, would be able to teach his girl how to play baseball.
According to Martin, once Dave was challenged, “he just started pitching objects and balls and plastic bottles and stuff, and then all of a sudden, she just decided to hit it one day.”
Now, when Pepper has a plastic bat in her mouth, it’s hard to take her attention away from the ball. Eyes locked on her target, Pepper’s strategy is to shake her head back and forth to swing hard enough to make an impact on the ball heading her way. And even after connecting with the ball, Pepper remains in the zone just waiting for the next ball to be pitched.
“Sometimes, I swear, she’s just in tornado mode,” Martin said. “She’ll just whip her head around violently and see if she hits it.”
Martin said Pepper can hit “pretty far,” adding, “We’ve had ‘em go on top of the roof when she’s out in the alleyway. She’s hit them out in the street. I mean, she’s hit them far. She’s got a lot of muscle — and accuracy. Her eyes are attached to the thing that she’s swinging with, so she’s got a lot of accuracy.”
Martin joked, “We took slow-motion videos before, and we were watching her eyes, and she’s, like, glued to the ball.”
Pepper’s baseball success brought her to “The Tonight Show” earlier this spring, which Martin said “was a little bit of an overwhelming experience for her.” He added, “When we got to New York, she was like, ‘Oh, this is a big city.’ She’s totally not adjusted to the city.”
Martin joked that Pepper’s velcro-dog tendencies that keep her attached to her dad’s hip weren’t quite conducive to the behind-the-scenes of taping “The Tonight Show.”
He said that before the taping of “The Tonight Show,” a dog handler approached them and said, ‘Oh, we’ll take the dog,’ so Dave put a collar on Pepper.
He continued, “The dog handler starts walking away. We’re walking away, and all of a sudden we’re like, ‘Oh, Pepper’s back with us again.’ Pepper backed out of the collar literally within like 5 seconds. The dog handler, laughing, said, ‘Uh, I don’t have a dog anymore!’”
Pepper has also been featured on “We Rate Dogs” and “Ridiculousness” for being a world-class athlete. Thanks to her fame, Pepper can make her own living to support the need for replacement bats.
But for Pepper, playing baseball and other sports isn’t for fame. She’s a humble girl who just sees this as a way to spend quality time with the person she loves the most: her dad. Martin agreed that Pepper was “glued to her dad.
“These dogs are so connected with their owners, and they’re working dogs, so they always want to have a purpose and an activity to do,” Martin said. “I think once she realized, ‘Oh, this is the premise of this activity. I need to hit this ball with this bat.’ Now, I mean, she’ll do this all day long.”
As a nod to her social media namesake, David “Big Papi” Ortiz, Pepper summarized her athletic abilities by saying, “I showed people that it’s not about guessing what people can do. It’s about saying, ‘Here, show me what you can do.’”
