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 those spared of such ailments at 30 can still be in their prime, baby, and in that regard, Machado was not embellishing. The .306 average he carries into this weekend's series against the Los Angeles Dodgers, which will culminate on Sunday Night Baseball, is the highest of his career. So is his .376 on-base percentage and 161 OPS+. He should reach the 30-home run threshold for the sixth time in his career. The Padres, for all their inconsistencies, are 73-59 and hold a three-game lead over Milwaukee for the third wild-card spot in the National League. Machado stands shoulder-to-shoulder with Nolan Arenado, Mookie Betts and Freddie Freeman as the biggest threats to Paul Goldschmidt's grip on the NL MVP award.

"This is the game we love," Machado said. "Have a smile on your face every single day and try to leave it on the field every single day. That's all we can control. This game is already hard enough. Lot of cameras, a lot of things that we have to adapt ourselves to, so, at the end of the day, it's just about hitting a baseball, catching a baseball, getting some outs and winning games for your ballclub. So just enjoy yourself to the fullest."

Being as good as Machado has been for this long — first-ballot Hall of Fame good, 3,000-hit-club good — and having no championship ring to show for it humbles a man, forces him to assess his priorities. So Machado is thinking bigger now, about his reputation, his place in the game, how he wants to be remembered — his legacy. They're questions a younger version of himself would not have cared to answer and ones the current incarnation has plenty of time to sort out. Because for all he has done, Manny Machado feels like his career is just beginning.

The greatest comfort in Machado's career comes not from the financial windfall of the staggering 10-year, $300 million contract he signed with the Padres in February 2019, but that the first four seasons of that deal have been a resounding success. For those who don't perform, the megadeal becomes a player's defining characteristic, the prism through which his every failure is viewed. A dollar sign and nine numbers handcuff themselves to him.

Players who avoid such fates can train their time and attention elsewhere, to doing things like legacy-building. Enough snafus exist in Machado's past — the bat throw against Oakland, the slide into Dustin Pedroia, the hustle comments with the Dodgers — that growth was necessary to ensure youthful indiscretions don't define him. Whatever happened in his 20s, Machado sees his 30s as an opportunity to be his best self.