As you may have heard by now, the Florida Marlins aren’t half bad. The first team in major league history to get their record above .500 after having been, at one point, 20 games below, the Marlins have made news several different ways this year. Owner Jeffrey Loria apparently fired rookie manager Joe Girardi after the former Yanks catcher told him to stop yelling at an umpire during a game; third baseman Miguel Cabrera is in the hunt for the MVP award; the team, after last winter’s fire sale, has a payroll smaller than Derek Jeter’s salary.All of these have been big stories, but the biggest story is that with a likely make-or-break four-game set with the Phillies starting tomorrow, the Marlins have an entirely legitimate chance to make the playoffs. Should they do so, they’ll have an entirely legitimate chance to win their third World Series in a decade.

Since they were an easy pick to be the circuit’s worst team at the beginning of the year, and played below expectations through the first quarter of the season, it’s natural enough to look for explanations for their astounding success. Is Girardi a genius? Has the team proved that playing for success every year is a mug’s game, and that the path to championships is constantly reloading with players barely old enough to drink? Are Cabrera and Dontrelle Willis the new Jeter and Andy Pettitte?

All these explanations have a bit of truth to them. Girardi is clearly a very talented manager, and the team’s philosophy that if you’re not going for it all you may as well play the youngest, cheapest players you can find, works provided you can judge young talent, and certainly having two young players the caliber of Willis and Cabrera makes building a team a lot easier. The best explanation, though, is the simplest — the Marlins are a well-run team that’s been astoundingly, freakishly lucky.

On a structural level, there have been three keys to the team’s success. First is having Cabrera and Willis; there are a lot of teams with some decent young talent, but without anchors for the lineup and rotation, it can be pretty hard to do anything with that talent. Second is that, with the exception of veteran starter Brian Moehler and his 6.18 ERA, the team hasn’t given substantial playing time to anyone who’s really awful, which is the most common mistake teams make. Third is that they’ve had star level performances from several players that no one, absolutely no one, could have expected to play this well.

Take the Marlins’ middle infield of Hanley Ramirez and Dan Uggla. Uggla, whose batting line is .291 BA/.353 OBA/.499 SLG, has hit better than any second baseman in the league save Philadelphia’s Chase Utley, and Ramirez (.287/.350/.461) is behind only Jose Reyes among shortstops.

Uggla is 26 years old, a longtime Arizona farmhand who was picked in the Rule 5 draft. Last year, in his second goround in Double-A, he hit .297/.378/.502 in a hitter’s park. Basically, he was Jeff Keppinger, someone with an upside as a league-average second baseman, worth a bad team giving some playing time on the chance he could serve as a stopgap at the minimum salary for a year or two. Ramirez, 22, was at least a highly-regarded prospect coming out of the Red Sox’s system, but having slugged .385 last year in Double-A, he could not have been expected to do what he’s doing for another year or two.

That the Marlins supported these two with older prospects like former Met Mike Jacobs and longtime minor league catcher Josh Willingham, who could always hit, is to their credit, as is their willingness to entrust major league jobs to risky commodities like Uggla and Ramirez. But there’s no blueprint here. If the Marlins could pick out which minor league veterans were capable of hitting like Jeff Kent at will, they’d win 110 games every year.

Just as they’re getting wild overperformance on the hitting side, so are they on the pitching side. Past Willis, the team’s best pitchers have been Josh Johnson, who’s second in the league in ERA, Scott Olsen, and Anibal Sanchez. All were in Double-A last year, and all are 22. Fine prospects though they were, there is again no blueprint for having three 22-year-old pitchers come up from Double-A and immediately succeed in the starting rotation. Shrewd scouting and coaching can definitely minimize risk, but even the most talented pitching prospects are almost completely unpredictable, and usually take time to adjust to the majors. The Marlins’ corps hasn’t, so the Marlins have a chance to win yet another ring out of nowhere.

It would be foolish, though, to dismiss the Marlins’ success as the mere product of luck — it’s not. They’re lucky that so many rookies have exceeded expectations, but it wasn’t luck that they had those rookies to begin with, nor that they were willing to entrust them with jobs. It’s easy to overstate how good an idea it is to blow up a mediocre team and start over with kids; often it just doesn’t work. But it’s just as easy to overstate how good an idea it is not to do so. A horrible team like the Kansas City Royals, or a merely uninspiring one like the Seattle Mariners, can always come up with an excuse to play a boring old veteran rather than someone like Dan Uggla — and they can always go yet another year risking little and gaining nothing.The sheer willingness to risk catastrophic failure in the name of a good 2008 team was the right move for the Marlins to make, and if their numbers all come up this year and they win again, they’ll deserve it.