“Baseball stars may come and they may go, but the name of Nig Cuppy will live forever. There will be greater pitchers than Cuppy—but no slower ones.”—The Pittsburgh Press, 1910.
George Joseph “Nig” Cuppy (born Koppe) lived in the shadow of teammate Cy Young—Cuppy won 150 games for the Cleveland Spiders and St. Louis Perfectos from 1892-1899, Young won 231.
While Cuppy was successful, he was best known for being the slowest working pitcher of his era.
How Slow? “Painfully slow,” according to The Toledo News-Bee; other contemporary accounts mention crowds counting in unison as they timed Cuppy between each pitch. It was not unusual for a Cuppy pitched game to last more than two hours during an era when shorter games were the rule.
George “Nig” Cuppy
Almost all mentions of Cuppy attribute his success to his slow work. Jake Morse’s Baseball Magazine described the effect he had on batters:
“(Cuppy) stood holding the ball, and holding it, and holding it some more. The maddened batsmen fumed and fretted and smote the plate with their sticks; the umpires barked and threatened; the fans counted and counted, often up to 56 or 59—and then Cuppy let go of the ball. By this time the batter, if at all nervous or excitable, was so sore that he slammed wildly at the pitch, and seldom hit it.”
While Cuppy remained a very good pitcher throughout the 1890s, he never quite matched his rookie numbers (28-13, 2.51 in 1892), and suffered from the 1893 elimination of the pitcher’s box.
Cuppy’s numbers dropped off dramatically after 1896, and his career came to an end with his release from the Boston Americans in August of 1901. He rejected several minor league offers and returned home Elkhart, Indiana.
Cuppy and his former catcher and fellow Elkhart native, Lou Criger opened a pool hall called The Lucky Horseshoe. Cuppy operated that business and a cigar store until his death in 1922.
Baseball History Daily 
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