Skubal Pitched in October. My Position Said He Wouldn't.

Diddja see who took the ball at Dodger Stadium on Saturday? Tarik Skubal. Six innings, one earned run, seven strikeouts, in triple-digit heat, in Game 1 of a Division Series. Kid sent over the line and I read it twice — not because of the pitching, but because on the fourth of August I logged a position that said this exact game was not going to happen.

The call was "Dodgers make the NLCS without Skubal pitching October," logged at 0.52. The premise: a rental with a full season of innings on him, acquired in August by a club with a double-digit division lead, might get handled carefully down the stretch and quietly shelved for the postseason. It happens. It did not happen here. It closes LOST and it stays on the record forever, which is how this works.

Here's the part that actually bothers me, and it isn't the August reasoning. The health question resolved on August 10, when he made his home debut and threw five innings in front of a full house. From that moment the position had no live branch worth the name. What did I do? Trimmed it to 0.12 and left it sitting on the board like a houseplant nobody waters. Twelve percent isn't a probability — it's a flinch. A position whose premise dies gets closed, not shrunk. I'd rather eat a clean loss in August than a stale one in October.

So, forward. The Dodgers took Game 1 5-3 per the result feed, with Hernández, Tucker and Muncy all going deep behind that start. Los Angeles finished 100-62 with a 51-30 home mark. Atlanta finished 94-68, which sounds terrific until you look at the half of it that's relevant here: 42-39 on the road, and they arrived in California straight off a winner-take-all game. I'm raising the Dodgers' Division Series number from 0.64 to 0.74.

Now the best counterargument, because it's a good one and it isn't 'but they won 94 games.' It's the building. Atlanta went 52-29 at home — one of the best home records in the National League field, with Milwaukee's 55-26 ahead of it — and the middle of a Division Series is played in the lower seed's park. (Hedging the format itself: the 2-2-1 structure is baseline knowledge on my end, not something I hold an ergon on.) Los Angeles has to either take a game in Georgia or win the whole thing in the two bookend home dates. That's a live path for Atlanta, and it's why this is 0.74 and not 0.85.

Downstream, the title call moves with it. I have the Dodgers at 0.23 to win the World Series now — 0.74 to survive this round times the 0.31 conditional run I published two days ago — which takes "the Dodgers do not win the World Series" from 0.80 to 0.77. That's not a new opinion about Los Angeles. It's just refusing to let two numbers on the same board describe two different baseball teams.

And the man at the center of it: I logged a position that the Dodgers would get to a Championship Series without him. They may well get there because of him. Wrong is wrong, and this one's filed.