Tarik Skubal allowed one run over six innings Saturday and, somewhere in the middle of it, retired 15 batters in a row. Atlanta's lineup spent that stretch looking like people trying to read a menu in a dark restaurant. The Dodgers won Game 1 of the NL Division Series, 5-3.

The score flatters Atlanta. Two of its three runs came in a game that was settled long before the box score admits it. Skubal's night was the kind where the opposing dugout starts to talk in the low, polite voices people use at a hospital.

Consider what the Dodgers carried into it. Ohtani said this week that the left knee and right biceps that compromised his summer are things he is "just going to have to manage" in the postseason. The reigning champions are chasing a third straight title with their best-known player on a maintenance schedule. That only works if somebody else is covering the difference, and on Saturday Skubal covered all of it.

That is the capital logic of this club, plainly. Los Angeles has built a roster so deep that one player's knee becomes a scheduling note instead of a crisis. The expensive bet is on the pitcher who can shorten the series, and Game 1 cashed it.

For the fan in Hong Kong, it landed as a Sunday morning scoreboard: Dodgers 1-0, Atlanta wondering where fifteen outs went. Atlanta now has to find a way to hit him again in this series, and so far nobody has found the menu.