Baseball icon Sammy Sosa made a rare public appearance in Beverly Hills on Wednesday, August 19.
Sosa, 57, smiled for cameras at The Pump Group’s VIP Summer Soiree at Gravitas social club, looking noticeably different from an infamous red carpet appearance nearly a decade ago. He flashed a peace sign while wearing a sharp royal-blue blazer over a black zip-up shirt with a red, white and black striped collar paired with dark jeans.
The former Chicago Cubs slugger had a decidedly lighter skin tone when he was photographed at Miami’s Art Basel in 2017, which he had previously chalked up to a skin bleaching cream.
“Look at what I am today. This is my life, and I don’t take garbage from nobody,” Sosa told Sports Illustrated in 2018 when asked about his skin color. “I do whatever I want.”
Sammy’s oldest son, Sammy Jr., now 29, told the magazine at the time that conversation about his father’s skin tone “doesn’t affect him,” but also acknowledged, “I’m sure he feels a certain way.”
“Like, ‘Man, I gave so many years and so much hard work for you guys, and now you want to undermine all that because of some decisions I’m making — some personal decision that don’t affect you at all?’” Sammy Jr. said.
Sammy Jr. added, “He’s a really closed-off person, even with me. He doesn’t mean to be. There are some things I don’t know about my dad that I wonder about.”
The former baseball star’s appearance first stirred up conversation in 2009, when he appeared at the Latin Grammys with a lighter complexion than he had in his playing days. Sammy played his last MLB game in 2007.
Sammy told Univision’s Primer Impacto at the time that it was the result of “a bleaching cream that I apply before going to bed and whitens my skin some.”
“It’s a cream that I have, that I use to soften [my skin], but has bleached me some,” he said. “I’m not a racist, I live my life happily. 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.”
In December 2024, Sammy issued a statement to fans in which he apologized to baseball fans, widely considered to be an admission of steroid use during his career.
“I understand why some players in my era don’t always get the recognition our stats deserve,” Sosa said. “There were times I did whatever I could to recover from injuries in an effort to keep my strength up to perform over 162 games. I never broke any laws. But in hindsight, I made mistakes and I apologize.”
