Motivation Quote by David Cone

Cone’s line is a pitcher talking in pitchers’ time: not years, but standards. By pairing Roger Clemens and Greg Maddux as the twin poles of “our era,” he’s sketching two different blueprints for dominance - Clemens as the power-and-edge avatar, Maddux as the surgeon who could win with movement, guile, and a map of your weaknesses. It’s praise, but it’s also taxonomy. Cone isn’t just complimenting peers; he’s telling you what counted in that moment of baseball history, when starting pitchers still anchored franchises and the culture still treated the ace as a weekly event.

The subtext is credibility-by-proximity. Cone was a contemporary, a competitor, and part of the same late-80s-to-early-2000s pitching ecosystem: radar guns getting louder, the strike zone morphing, offenses spiking, and legacies being argued in real time. “Defined our era” is a big phrase that quietly admits how eras are built: by a few names that become shorthand for excellence, fear, and inevitability.

Then he slips in the kicker: “Randy Johnson is right behind them and still going.” That “still going” is doing cultural work. It’s awe at durability in a job that breaks bodies, and it’s a reminder that Johnson’s dominance felt almost unnatural - the late-career surge, the intimidation factor, the sense that he was aging differently than everyone else. Cone frames Johnson as a living argument, actively rewriting the hierarchy while the ink is still wet.