The baseball season comes down to series of weighted coin flips. It might seem overly simplistic, but over a season the good teams win around 60 percent of their games (a 97.2 win pace), while the bad teams win around 40 percent of their games, a 64.8 win pace.
Most teams lie somewhere in the middle, where the Rays are projected. Most projections that are currently out have the Rays winning between 81 and 85 games. The Rays are expected to be flipping a slightly weighted coin. 162 games is a lot, and sounds like it should remove a lot of the variance.