Sammy Sosa Whiter Shade of Pale

Sammy Sosa’s greatest moment in sports was either his 90’s home run title race with Mark McGwire or less than a decade later when fronting No Hablo Ingles in front of a Congressional panel on PEDs in baseball. Depending on whether you’re a Cubs fan or not.

Sosa didn’t simply mildly cheat in sports. He cheated massively. Unlike Tom Brady who may have under-inflated a football, the roids-era baseball boppers inflated their entire bodies for a decade or more with unlawfully injected chemicals. Steve Rogers went through a less obvious transformation by way of vita-rays. Nobody cared. Everybody colluded in the ratings boost. Then blamed the athletes after the fact for gambling in Casablanca. 

Many of the bigger names involved in the baseball juicing exposed era receded into down low living. Bonds, Clemens, and their ilk shied away from interviews and high profile positions in the sport. Sosa went even deeper undercover. He started what can only be described as a skin bleaching routine that would make even Michael Jackson wince. Like a sodomized boy if you need a comparison.

As far back as 2009, Charles Barkley was mocking Sosa for trying to become white enough to get into the Hall of Fame. Sosa claimed a “rejuvenation” program changed his complexion. He later amended that comment to a skin cream he’d been using for three years had altered his skin color. Which makes even less sense. In 2014, Aroldis Chapman took a dig at Sosa’s white face. Now Sosa’s reached the extreme of creepy looking white face guy. 

Numerous black entertainers bleach their skin. Azealia Banks defended her use of skin bleach based on some irrationally reverse racism proof. Beyonce doesn’t talk about her lightening and blond hair so much, not when she’s repping BLM and making bank. There’s probably some economic argument to be made that lighter skinned black women fare better in media and entertainment. Hard to believe that same argument exists for the guys. Black men clearly mock their lighter skinned brethren in sports as being weaker. Stephen Curry gets that a lot. LeBron James doesn’t.

The simplest answer is almost always the correct answer. Sosa is a dolt who became even more brain addled with horse sac injections. He has no idea what he’s doing, but he’s one of ten people in the Dominican not dirt poor and he’s surrounded himself with minions who tell him he’s only got great ideas. Also, they can get him the good stuff from a guy they know. Whatever that good stuff is. In this case, skin bleach.

_{Photo credit: Getty Images}