"…I remain an adamant opponent of the DH rule -- the one vital subject in our culture that permits no middle ground. You gotta either love it or hate it," p99
The Milwaukee Brewers switched from the American League to the National League and the Houston Astros recently switched in the opposite direction. I for one side with Gould and hate the DH. No one should be able to specialize in batting and be allowed to only bat. Yes, some pitchers suck at hitting, but a pitcher with a bat can change the game. Greg Maddux was a great hitting pitcher. CC Sabathia loved batting with the Brewers after getting DH'd his entire career. Having the pitcher bat intrinsically protects batters; what pitcher would want to bean a batter knowing that he's on deck the next half inning.
"Several years later I redid the study by a better, albeit far more laborious, method of calculating the conventional measure of total variation -- the standard deviation--for all regular players in each year (three weeks at the computer for my research assistant--and did he ever relish the break from measuring snails!--rather than several enjoyable personal hours propped up in bed with the Baseball Encyclopedia)," p 106
This sentence exemplifies Gould's writing; long (four long dashes, an explanation point in the middle of it) but still is very understandable. The sentence sticks out in particular because it displays how scholars enter the ranks of scientists. We have no idea who this research assistant was, Gould doesn't mention their name. S/he spent 3 weeks to basically make a graph that Gould could analyze. Undergrad, graduate school, then a research assistant for one of the greatest evolutionary biologists in the world and you are stuck researching baseball stats one player at a time for every baseball season. Science can sometimes be unfulfilling, yet I imagine that every scientist has a story about how they spent too much time on a unfruitful project.
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