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Motivation Quote by David Wells

"There are guys in the game only because of steroids. They couldn't make it with their natural talent, so they had to enhance themselves. It sucks"

About this Quote

Wells is doing something athletes do when they’re tired of euphemisms: he drags the steroid era out of the gray zone and puts it in blunt clubhouse English. “Guys in the game only because of steroids” isn’t a nuanced policy argument; it’s an accusation about stolen oxygen. The line draws a hard boundary between earned belonging and manufactured access, and in a sport obsessed with numbers, it’s really about legitimacy: who deserved the roster spot, the contract, the innings, the legend.

The subtext is less moral purity than labor economics. Baseball careers are zero-sum at the margins. If a fringe player turns into a viable big leaguer through chemistry, someone else becomes the “what if” guy stuck in Triple-A, the veteran cut a year early, the prospect rushed and broken. Wells frames PED use not as victimless self-improvement but as a fraud that reorganizes opportunity.

“It sucks” lands because it’s small and human. He doesn’t say it’s a scandal, a tragedy, a crime. He says it like a coworker who watched someone game the system and get promoted. That deflates the grandstanding and makes the resentment feel credible.

Context matters: Wells pitched through baseball’s late-90s/early-2000s credibility crisis, when fans were sold a spectacle and players operated in a wink-wink ecosystem of trainers, whispers, and selective enforcement. His tone suggests a veteran’s exhaustion with the after-the-fact sanitizing. It’s not just anger at cheaters; it’s anger that the sport asked everyone else to pretend not to notice.

Quote Details

TopicSports
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Citation Formats

APA Style (7th ed.)
Wells, David. (2026, January 15). There are guys in the game only because of steroids. They couldn't make it with their natural talent, so they had to enhance themselves. It sucks. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/there-are-guys-in-the-game-only-because-of-111501/

Chicago Style
Wells, David. "There are guys in the game only because of steroids. They couldn't make it with their natural talent, so they had to enhance themselves. It sucks." FixQuotes. January 15, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/there-are-guys-in-the-game-only-because-of-111501/.

MLA Style (9th ed.)
"There are guys in the game only because of steroids. They couldn't make it with their natural talent, so they had to enhance themselves. It sucks." FixQuotes, 15 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/there-are-guys-in-the-game-only-because-of-111501/. Accessed 6 Feb. 2026.

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David Wells (born May 20, 1963) is a Athlete from USA.

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