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Can someone clarify gasperini for me? I am not getting this. I see in a lot of places that it stands for "reading the rules narrowly" to accommodate both the state and federal system. How exactly is that happening in the case?

"Reading the rules narrowly" is one of the steps in any federal court's Erie analysis. It avoids a conflict between state and federal law, and so obviates the need for further analysis which is tbh just a bunch of ad hoc balancing moulded to to fit somewhere in the neighborhood of Byrd/Hanna/Sibbach/etc.

In Gasperini, RBG was pretty ticked off that a federal court sitting in diversity could potentially allow a jury award much larger than a New York court would for a claim arising under New York law. She very much wanted there to be a conflict between New York's standard of review for excessiveness of a jury's award and the federal standard, and wanted to toss out the federal standard for the New York one at the trial level, which is what the case did.