Motivation Quote by David Wells

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.