The internet is working overtime trying to make sense of a now-viral photo of former Major League Baseball heavy-hitter, Sammy Sosa. The picture, viewed nearly 3 million times, was posted on X by @RickNunley60. And although it was taken on March 1 at the Chicago Cubs spring training facility in Mesa, Arizona, some insist it has to be a blast from Sosa’s past. Even Shannon Sharpe has entered the conversation.
“They say Sammy, he Black again,” Sharpe said on the March 3 episode of his “Nightcap” podcast, reacting to the pic Nunley tagged “Sammy Sosa Saturday.”
Sharpe and others are puzzled by this newly-melanated version of Sosa – who is from the Dominican Republic – because in the years since his retirement, his once-brown skin has appeared almost white in some photos.
In a 2009 interview with Univision, Sosa admitted he had been using a product to whiten his skin.
“It’s a bleaching cream that I apply before going to bed and whitens my skin tone,” he said. “It’s a cream that I have, that I use to soften [my skin], but has bleached me some. I’m not a racist, I live my life happily.”
Naturally, the picture of a darker Sosa left Sharpe’s cohost Chad Ochocinco with lots of questions.
“How do you go from bleaching your skin to being Black again?” he asked Sharpe.
“Man, Sammy look like the Wayans brothers the “White Chick,” Sharpe laughed.
After joking with Ochocinco about how he’s been Black his whole life, Sharpe seemed to offer Sosa an olive branch back into the Black community.
“Glad to have you back, Sammy,” he said.
The conversation continued on Rick Nunley’s X post, with lots of people wondering how Sammy Sosa got back to Black.
“Where the hell you find pre-bleached Sammy Sosa at?!” someone wrote in the comments.
Others were not convinced that the picture in question was taken in the 21st century.
“This picture from 1998,” one commenter insisted.