Mach-ado about Manny’s 5-RBI night

At times, Orioles third baseman Manny Machado makes the game look ridiculously easy, and maybe that’s why we’ve been so slow to recognize his greatness.

Let’s cut to the chase. This is one of the 10 best baseball players on the planet, and that’s not even a stretch. One of the things this fast start by the Orioles (13-8) has done is turn a spotlight on him.

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About time, right? We’ve focused so intently on the Bryce Harper vs. Mike Trout debate or Kris Bryant, Carlos Correa and the waves of new talent that it has been easy to overlook Machado.

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That’s virtually impossible to do these days as Machado continues to emerge across the board as a polished, dominant player. If there’s a downside to his game it’s that he’s so smooth and so poised that he makes even the most difficult parts of the game seem way more routine than they should be.

Machado does everything well and showed it again on Thursday night in getting two hits and driving in five runs, including four on his second career grand slam, in a 10-2 victory over the White Sox at Camden Yards.

Machado is hitting .333 with nine doubles and seven home runs in 21 games. His OPS is 1.068, and his name is dotted up and down the Major League leaderboards. He began Thursday with a 1.4 Wins Above Replacement value, fourth-best in the Majors, according to fangraphs.com, trailing only Dexter Fowler (2.0), Jose Altuve (1.6) and Gregory Polanco (1.5).

Sure, numbers can be spun this way or …

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