The 'Daily Racing Form' has been the source for both insiders and fans for 100 years. AP
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This year is the centennial of Albert Einstein formulating his theory of relativity. In sports, 1905 produced the greatest World Series performance ever when Christy Mathewson led the New York Giants to the championship by pitching three shutouts in six days.

But these events pale by comparison to another achievement of that year, which has surely had a more salubrious, conspicuous effect upon larger elements of humankind. Yes, it was exactly 100 years ago this summer that the Daily Racing Form first started printing past performances of race horses -- those arcane numbers and cryptic words which allow horse players to make their betting choices.

Past performances are the Rosetta Stone of sport. No literature from the poets of the sports pages has ever approached the influence of those lines of agate which tell us, in one swoop: dates of recent races, fractional times, speed figures, medications taken, equipment worn, odds, pedigree, career totals, trainer, jockey, speed figures, positions during races, workouts. Not to mention pithy summary comments like: "just up," "outrun," "passed tired horses," "dueled, weakened" and "came up empty."

If only theatrical and movie critics could be so succinct.

The scales fall from your eyes when you learn to read past performances. There are various signposts in your youth which speak to growing up: your first kiss, your first shave, your first drink of hard liquor. For me, it was the first day I could understand past performances. I became a man among men that glorious adolescent afternoon.

While it was the Daily Racing Form that pioneered the publication of past performances that momentous summer of ought-five it was, it seems, a charismatic gambler named George E. Smith who personally perfected the practice. Smith was better known simply as "Pittsburgh Phil,"a memorable man of equal parts aphorisms and acumen. He was as much a student of his fellow gamblers as of thoroughbreds.

"All consistently successful players of horses are men of temperate habits," Smith wrote. And wiser still: "A man cannot divide his attentions at the track between horses and women."

The tendency of most gamblers -- at a race track, casino, card table, wherever -- is to try and get out of the hole by betting more heavily. Pittsburgh Phil advised the reverse, for he understood that a bettor who is losing also has lost some of his wits.

No, no, no, Phil said: "Cut your bets when in a losing streak and increase them when running in a spasm of good luck." The man knew his stuff. By creating his own past performances, he literally beat the odds. When he, alas, died in 1905 at the young age of 43, he left an estate of almost $2 million -- an incredible sum in those days.

Yes, Pittsburgh Phil died just months before the Daily Racing Form's publisher, Frank Brunell, came up with the concept of printing for the masses the sort of material Pittsburgh Phil had collected for himself.

Numbers are so much more integral to sport than they are to other entertainments. I've often speculated that we might consider the possibility that more boys take to math than girls because more boys grow up acquainted with how to divine the likes of earned-run averages and betting lines. But for all the numbers in sport, none are so complex and influential as what the Form came up with one day 100 summers ago.

Without them, you just got no chance.