Whether or not the Mets make the playoffs, in one important sense this year has already been a raging success: It’s fun to root for the team again.

This may not be a hard criterion like wins or revenue, but in a way it’s just as important. The heavy despair that settled in over the franchise last fall wasn’t caused just by the team’s collapse and failure, after all, but also by the joyless nature of it. To lose is one thing; to lose with a Hall of Fame pitcher tossing balls into short left field is another. And if the Mets were an infinitely frustrating team to watch in the early going this year, that wasn’t only because they seemed to be fulfilling contractual obligations to throw a game away to match each win, but also because of their generally dreary, lifeless play. Playing poorly is all right, but only if you do it in style.

Whatever you can say about the Jerry Manuel Mets, they haven’t been dreary. Mike Pelfrey turning into the second coming of Kevin Brown? Luis Ayala, he of the 1-8 record and 5.77 ERA, nailing down game after game? The mere existence of Daniel Murphy? Not since the days of Benny Agbayani and Pat Mahomes have so many players done such improbable things in so many stirring victories — none of which even takes into account the improbable resurrection of Carlos Delgado, or Jose Reyes’s re-emergence as the most electric player in the game, or Johan Santana’s surpassing mastery of the art of pitching. If this team loses, at least you’ll be able to say they had a fine run.

For this more than any other reason, Manuel deserves the contract extension he’ll almost certainly be getting this fall. There was much for which to criticize Willie Randolph, but whether you thought his in-game tactics, reliance on stale veteran talent, or grim fortitude was his worst flaw, what they all had in common was a certain rigidity that didn’t match the talent he had on hand, or the situation in which he found himself. Calm is a virtue, but not when it edges over into stubbornness. Manuel isn’t perfect, but he isn’t stubborn, and he’s not afraid to take a risk. There’s a bit of Bobby Valentine in his style, and it’s fitting that so much of the success he’s enjoyed this year has come, as Valentine’s did, from his willingness not just to turn to the unlikeliest players, but to trust them.

Marveling at what Manuel has done with players such as Ayala, Fernando Tatis, Nick Evans, and company, though, should not make one forget the essential nature of these players, or how bizarre it is that a $140 million team has proved so reliant on them. Manuel is something like a chef who’s made a marvelous meal out of a couple of preposterously expensive cuts from Pino’s on Sullivan Street and a bagful of wilted produce from a sketchy greengrocer. Good on him for getting so much out of a fistful of suspiciously brown Swiss chard, some sad-looking onions, and a pint of no-name Czech beer — but what about the guy who did the shopping?

General manager Omar Minaya is as much of a lock to receive a contract extension as Manuel is, however the season ends, and so far as he’s responsible for what’s right with the team, that’s fair enough. You could make a long list of what he’s done right, and what he hasn’t done that’s right, that directly bears on why his team is in first place. Randolph’s firing was botched, but it was done, which was what counted. Minaya didn’t give up on Delgado, or panic at the trade deadline, and the surprising fruits of the purportedly desiccated farm system were drafted on his watch. He also, of course, brought in Santana and Carlos Beltran, moves that may not make him a genius but certainly can’t be held against him, and that rate with the long-ago drafting of David Wright and the signing of Reyes as the main reasons the Mets are so good.

For all this, that the Mets were ever in a hole at all is largely due to Minaya’s less inspired moves, ranging from his decision to rely heavily on a whole flotilla of old players from Delgado to Moises Alou to Orlando Hernandez to such smaller choices as bizarrely signing Marlon Anderson to a multiyear contract. And many of their present problems, the ones that could yet cost them the playoffs, are down to more of his moves. If the team is without a proven closer, for instance, that’s partly because Minaya signed an old one with a history of arm woes.

All of this is to say that while Minaya is a near-certainty to be extended, it’s an open question whether he’ll really be the best available candidate for his job. His hand is in the events that have left this team on the verge of something really special; it was also in those that turned it into a botch. He’s created a wildly entertaining team, but also one that for all its merits isn’t nearly as good as it could be. Luckily for him, he just may have found a manager who can make it look better than it is.

tmarchman@nysun.com