Eddie Cicotte squinted away the mid-afternoon sun, ready to throw the pitch heard ’round the nation.

Sixty feet, six inches away squatted his catcher, Ray Schalk. Together, the two men had crafted the season of Cicotte’s life across that summer of 1919: 29 wins against but 12 losses, a stingy 1.82 ERA. The statistic WHIP had yet to be conceived yet — the average of walks and hits per inning — but if it had, Cicotte’s was 0.995. That’s filthy in any era.

“I put the glove down, ol’ Eddie hits the glove, it’s a good partnership,” Schalk had said a few days earlier, a few days before his Chicago White Sox of the American League would face the Nationals League’s Cincinnati Reds, best of nine games to determine the champions of the world.

This day, Oct. 1, had dawned warm and humid, one final yelp of summer hard by the Ohio River. Cicotte and Schalk both knew that The Reds’ Morrie Rath, leading off the bottom of the first, would take the first pitch no matter where it was thrown. Cicotte’s first pitch was middle-middle, waist-high, over the plate, and Rath never moved his bat.

Schalk thought Cicotte had been a little reckless there. He put down two fingers. Cicotte nodded. That’s precisely the pitch he was looking to throw. Out of his hand, the baseball spun furiously, and it arched on a wide parabola directly for its intended target: between the shoulder blades of Rath’s back. Rath took his base.

It was a purpose pitch. It may, in fact, have been the most purposeful pitch ever thrown in the 150-year history of organized baseball, because in a time long before instant communication it delivered an immediate message to thousands of interested precincts.

In the stands at Redland Field that day, among the massive gathering of 30,511, sat Abe Attell, the onetime worldwide featherweight boxing champion. Dressed to the nines, he sat back in his chair and smiled. Around him came instant derisive chants. There had been some worry that Cicotte’s right arm was lame, a reason why odds on the Series had in recent days gone from heavily in favor of Chicago to dead even; there had also been some talk that something else was afoot.

“FIX!” a good chunk of the crowd roared. “The fix is in!”

Some 650 miles away, inside the Ansonia Hotel on Broadway between 73rd and 74th streets, Arnold Rothstein stood on the periphery of a crowd gathered to hear live play-by-play of the World Series, relayed from a telegraph to an announcer. “CICOTTE HITS RATH!” the man barked. And Rothstein smiled, put on his bowler hat, and headed for the street. There were three men in the world who were certain of what had just happened:

Rothstein, who had masterminded it all.

Attell, who had delivered the first installment of cash — $10,000 — to Cicotte’s room at Cincinnati’s Hotel Stinton, leaving the bundle on the pillow of his bed.

And Cicotte, who’d sewn the ten large into one of his sports coats for safekeeping, and whose pinpoint control had seen that the baseball arrived safely in the beefy part of Morrie Rath’s back.

The fix was, indeed, in.

A hundred years ago this month, a small coterie of professional gamblers recruited Cicotte and seven of his teammates to throw the World Series.

It was an audacious stunt made easy because the White Sox, a powerful team who’d won the Series two years earlier, were united in their distaste for Charles Comiskey, the man who owned the club.

Cicotte, for instance, was 35 years old and had only that season broken $5,000 in yearly salary. Comiskey had promised him a bonus if he won 30 games, then directed his manager, Kid Gleason, not to pitch him in any of the season’s final 14 games once he’d gotten to 29. The players saw Comiskey getting fat off their wares and that rankled; so did the fact that gamblers could make a killing off them.

That was the case across baseball. In New York City, there were two impresarios who took advantage of the New York Giants’ status as the unquestioned rulers of baseball in the city. One was Harry M. Stevens, the vending magnate, who made nine different fortunes hawking Coca-Cola, peanuts, chewing gum, beer, cigarettes.

The other were the gamblers who worked the third-base grandstand at the Polo Grounds. There, working in the open, they would take bets on the game at hand, future series, the pennant, or any other prop bets their customers could come up with — in addition to floating crap games and poker games. Their names were bold-faced in the newspapers: Max Blumenthal, Honest John Kelly, Leo Mayer, Jakey Josephs.

One name stood above the others, though. Arnold Rothstein had befriended John J. McGraw, manager of the Giants, and together the men had opened several billiards parlors across New York City. There was little mystery as to how Rothstein made his living — authorities knew that he was a mentor to such already-notorious underworld names as Lucky Luciano and Meyer Lansky. But the thought prevailed: gambling was a harmless vice. People might wind up dead broke, but not dead. That was the thinking, anyway.

And Rothstein thought big. That’s what drew him to the White Sox — that, and a willingness to put as much as $100,000 of his own money on the Reds, who at one point were 4-to-1 underdogs. Rothstein knew Attell well, because boxing, like baseball, was like a beer hall for gamblers.

Attell asked around, and he targeted eight White Sox who were intrigued enough to listen — Cicotte and fellow pitcher Lefty Williams were in. The team’s unrivaled star, outfielder “Shoeless Joe” Jackson — a lifetime .356 hitter, so named because as a kid, playing for the mill team back home, he’d foregone his uncomfortable spikes and promptly hit a triple barefoot — was in.

So was fellow outfielder Happy Felsch, and infielders Buck Weaver, Swede Risberg, Fred McMullin and Chick Gandil. In a meeting at the Ansonia on Sept. 21, with the Sox in town to play the Yankees, a few dollars were spread around to prove the gamblers were serious. All but Weaver took a share.

Almost immediately, in the small community of baseball players and sportswriters and gamblers, word leaked out. The possibility of betrayal was an open secret, and the odds reflected that: by the time Cicotte took the mound on Oct. 1, it was almost impossible to get even money on the Sox. And by the time he drilled Morrie Rath in the back, there was no other conclusion to draw.

In the press box, famed sportswriter Ring Larder sat next to Christy Mathewson, the ex-Giant pitching legend who was as famous for his square living as his devastating “fadeaway” pitch (known in modern parlance as a screwball). They took note of an assortment of odd plays, and the difference in the quality of the Sox overall play in games they lost (Games 1, 2, 4 and 5) and won (Games 3, 6 and 7).

Then, in decisive Game 8, at Chicago’s Comiskey Park in front of 32,930 increasingly angry fans, Lefty Williams faced five batters, allowed two singles and two runs, was replaced, but was charged with four runs that set up a clinching 10-5 walkover win for the Reds.

By then, there was little question. The 1920 season co-starred a grand jury, which handed out eight indictments late in the season. None of the players were ultimately convicted — this was Chicago in 1919, after all; Al Capone would soon be more powerful than the mayor — but a new commissioner of baseball, Kennesaw Mountain Landis, had been granted unlimited authority by owners fearful that there game might be destroyed by the scandal. He decided to ban them all for life.

Weaver, the one player who never took a dime but attended too many crooked meetings for Landis’ liking, maintained his innocence to the end. Jackson, who to that time was, perhaps, the third-best player who’d ever lived (behind Ty Cobb and Honus Wagner) became an instant footnote, the subject of a decades-long quest to push him into the Hall of Fame and, 70 years later a yearnful movie, “Field of Dreams,” in which he was once again free to roam outfields and smack line drives into cornfields.

But it was Rothstein who gained the largest amount of fame. In the early 21st Century, he was a key character in the popular HBO series “Boardwalk Empire.” In “The Godfather, Part 2,” a young protégé of Vito Corleone named Hyman Suchowsky, told he needed to change his name, was asked by Vito: “Who’s the greatest man you know?”

“Arnold Rothstein,” he replied, and thus was Hyman Roth born.

In his own lifetime, three years before he was murdered in a business dispute, Rothstein might have skimmed the pages of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 masterpiece “The Great Gatsby” and come across a character named Meyer Wofsheim, a mentor to Jay Gatsby, who, Gatsby tells Nick Carraway, “fixed the World Series back in 1919.” Carraway wonders how he isn’t in jail.

“They can’t get him, old sport,” Gatsby replies. “He’s a smart man.”

On Sept. 30, 1920, as Joe Jackson left the Grand Jury room at the Cook County Courthouse, a small boy clutched at his sleeve, sniffed back tears, and offered a plaintive question that remains a part of Bartlett’s Famous Quotations, even a century later.

“Say it ain’t so, Joe,” the boy pleaded. “Say it ain’t so.”

“I’m afraid it is, kid,” Shoeless Joe Jackson replied.

To this day, a sign hangs prominently in both clubhouses of all 30 major-league teams. It reads:

“Any player, umpire, or club official or employee, who shall bet any sum whatsoever upon any baseball game in connection with which the bettor has no duty to perform shall be declared ineligible for one year. Any player, umpire, or club or league official or employee, who shall bet any sum whatsoever upon any baseball game in connection with which the bettor has a duty to perform shall be declared permanently ineligible.”

It is a warning — and a lesson — exactly 100 years in the making.