Now that Rickey Henderson and Jim Rice have been inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame, fans the country over can return to the only thing they like as much as watching games: Arguing over who should join them in Cooperstown. Sadly, machine learning may have just taken much of the steam out of such arguments.

According to research by Lloyd Smith, a professor of computer science at Missouri State University, and James Downey, an assistant professor of management information systems at the University of Central Arkansas,...