What has been obvious for years is that Sammy Sosa no longer looks like he did back in the 1990s when he battled Mark McGwire for home run supremacy.
His change in appearance has been the subject of questions for years, and it came up again this weekend in response to ESPN releasing a documentary about his prolific 1998 summer on the baseball diamond.
Sosa, born in the Dominican Republic, has a much whiter complexion than he did during his MLB career.
He went to explain why his skin is the way it is:
“It’s a bleaching cream that I apply before going to bed and whitens my skin some,” Sosa said in a 2009 interview with Univision after a photo was taken at the Grammy Latino Awards, a first look at Sosa’s lighter complexion.
“What happened was that I had been using the cream for a long time and that, combined with the bright TV lights, made my face look whiter than it really is. I don’t think I look like Michael Jackson,” he said then.
In a 2018 interview with NBC Sports Chicago, he said he is healthy and denounced the criticism he’s received amid rumors of skin bleaching.
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“Those people they sometimes criticize me, they don’t know me, they don’t put food on my table and they don’t pay my bills,” he said.
“I’m not a racist, I live my life happily.”
His fall from grace had nothing to do with his skin color, but more to do with allegations he used performance enhancing drugs and has subsequently kept him separated from the Cubs and mostly out of the public eye.
