MLB Hall of Fame Voter Takes Issue With Sammy Sosa’s “Bleached-White Face”

Every year, there’s at least one MLB Hall of Fame voter that surprise us with their hypocrisy. On Wednesday, one voter took it to a whole new level of lunacy.

Since when did MLB Hall of Fame voters start to feel the need to explain why they voted they way they did in Hall of Fame Ballots? I long for the time when members of the BBWAA placed their votes and then went about their days as if nothing had ever happened.

This need to be transparent has only served as a way for fans to see just how ludicrous some of these voters are, making them question how it is that they were able to get a vote in the first place.

The latest edition in HOF voter lunacy came courtesy of NJ.com’s very own Randy Miller, who in an article published on Wednesday started off by making a pretty strong argument for not voting for Sammy Sosa:

"Sosa reportedly tested positive for using steroids in 2003, the same year that he was caught red-handed corking his bat, so he’s an easy no-vote for me despite his all-time great power numbers, which include a record three 60-homer seasons."

Then, as if lacking the ability to filter out the unecessary, or perhaps it was an attempt to appear clever, Miller adds that Sosa’s “bleached-white face” is a problem for him.

Smartly, Miller has since removed the line from his article, but Keith Law did us all a favor and etched it into the twitterverse for all to see.

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As a Dominican-American who idolized Sammy Sosa in my childhood, I too questioned Sammy’s sudden change in skin complexion.

He went from having a similar skin color to my mother, aunts and uncles to someone completely unknown to me. Pair that with the Dominican Republic’s checkered past – former Dictator Rafael Leonidas Trujillo was known to bleach his skin to appear whiter – and you naturally start to question Sammy’s motives.

In Sammy Sosa’s defense, however, he did state in an interview in Primer Impacto that he had been using a cream to soften his skin before bed each night, and that the cream had bleached his skin a bit.

Sure, the explanation seems odd, but the fact of the matter is that we don’t have all the facts.

One thing’s for sure, someone’s skin color – or someone’s dislike of their own skin color – should not come into consideration, for any HOF voter, when considering them for the MLB Hall of Fame.

Players need be judged by how they played the game and nothing more.