A quarter century has passed since baseball’s magical home run summer of 1998. The neck-and-neck race between the St. Louis Cardinals’ Mark McGwire and Chicago Cubs slugger Sammy Sosa was electric. But that special summer was soon linked to steroids and, of all people, Stephen Jay Gould, an acclaimed Harvard evolutionary biologist and dinosaur expert.
Dinosaurs? Gould studied evolution and dinosaurs, but he was also known for math, statistics, and a devotion to the New York Yankees. He became an expert on baseball statistics. His “Gould’s Law” states that as activities mature and expand, their statistics gravitate toward the mean, which helps explain the idea that when something disappears, it seldom re-emerges — like .400 hitters, and multiple 60+ home run hitters in one season.
