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player analysis and roster construction can be viewed like one would evaluate a car. Now I don't know much about cars. I mean, I know they have an engine, four wheels, etc. But my knowledge is very "surfacy" in some respects. I can look at a car and tell you whether it looks good, at least to me. But I cannot tell you if it is a good car or a bad car on my own.
I can find out more about the car, though. I can look up all kinds of info on the internet and become more educated about the car. It's book value. It's engine displacement. The kind of suspension it has, though I couldn't tell you which is better without trying to dig up an article on the subject, and more than likely I'd find several articles, some of them with differing opinions on what is best. I can tell you various opinions about the car, and whether a famous site recommends it or not (but I'd wonder if the site is getting a kickback to recommend certain brands). So in the end I'd have a lot of information about the car, I'd know it better than I did, but would I really know it?
Then I start to ask myself an important question, what about ME? What would the car do for me? What do I need in a car? What do I want in a car? Commuting? Style? "Cool"?, Power?, Durability? Acceleration? It's not enough to know about the car in general, I need to know my point of view to properly evaluate the car. A car that might rate just fine might be irrelevant to my need, or a "meh" car might do me just fine.
But none of this is my real point. When you get to the big leagues in baseball you're dealing with the crème de la crème. Top shelf players competing. Most AAA'ers won't have a prayer of competing successfully on that level. So using the car analogy, we're talking the best of the "fine" automobiles. At this point it goes beyond the specs, beyond the general characteristics, which are useful, but only to a point. At that level you have to have the experience of driving fine cars to distinguish not only between models, but between different examples of the same model. Owner of such cars come to know them like people. One car of the same model might be tempermental and doesn't seem to drive as well when it's cold and damp, but drives fine when it's just cold. Another doesn't have this quirk.
There are a zillion things that go into baseball evaluations. To me WAR and that kind of stuff has it's use, but it is like evaluating a car by reading about it on the internet and never actually driving it. Some guys combine sabermetrics with what pretty decent eyes-on scouting they can do as a fan, so maybe they have the advantage of having test driven the car...for ten minutes. But they won't know the car like someone who owns one and drives it every day for years.
At a certain point we have to know the limits of our information and our abilities. Imagine me if I was a whiz at internet research about cars, and I went to an auction of fine automobile collectors (you know you're in another league when the word "car" just won't suffice), and started mingling with the bidders and voicing my opinions about the cars up for auction. Don't you think it would be quickly apparent that comparatively speaking I was a third-grader to those I mingled with? Don't you think my opinion would be (rightly) ignored? Even if I was right in what I said, it would have been categorized as irrelevant ABC's long since left behind in the sophisticated and EXPENSIVE world of fine automobiles.