'It's my prime, baby' -- Why Manny Machado is the best he's ever been at age 30

He's the old guy in the room now, and that is not an easy fact for Manny Machado to accept. At the All-Star Game in July, a week after his 30th birthday, he chirped: «It's my prime, baby. I'm young. I'm young!» And a month later in Kansas City, where his San Diego Padres were still trying to figure out who exactly they are 125 games into the season, he started telling a story from his rookie year, now a decade ago. He got booted from a training-room table simply because he was young. Those were different times, he said, back in the day. All of which, he quickly realized, is the exact sort of thing the old guy might say, dammit.

Thing is, while Machado may be older, he is also wiser. As he chuckles self-deprecatingly, it's proof that as seriously as he still takes baseball, the game has taught him to take himself less so.

That's why the laughs are accompanied by more smiles than he shared in his formative seasons. These days, Machado likes to golf and go boating and play chess. He points to the scars on each of his knees and speaks with pride about how they've held up for him, carrying himself like the wunderkind who, at 20 years old, wheedled his 6-foot-3 frame to make plays few other third basemen dared try — in and back and especially to his right, into foul territory, fading toward the stands and still somehow finding enough in his arm to make the impossible real. All of it, put together, constitutes his inevitable descent into dadhood.

Machado swears that he's young — he's young! — even though baseball's newest dogma holds that 30 is a line of demarcation. For plenty, it does ring true. It is a sport filled with running back equivalents. Bats slow. Arms fail. Legs give. Gloves stiffen. The game is unforgiving.

But