Imagine if a baseball club had an oracle that could say with certainty how many hits a batter would compile, or how many runs a pitcher would allow, in the coming year, three years or decade. The best-performing teams would then be those with the best oracles. Such oracles don’t exist, of course. But artificial-intelligence (AI) models do. And they don’t need a crystal ball: they can predict the future simply by looking for mathematical patterns in reams of historical data.