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Make me 'King of America' and give me the option of taking the thousand best baseball players and play out the season as an experiment, and I guess we wouldn't learn all that much of predictive value, but we would learn about the limits of our models and it would be absolutely awesome.
Imagine if you could construct teams to test yours our others endless hypotheses: do you need balanced line-ups (power hitters and table setters), does Safeco really suck the will to live out of all RH pull hitters, would playing three gold glove CF in the outfield suppresses each ones value, and so much more.
The point is not that the performance of people can likely be predicted from a complex numerical model, rather that if you wanted to have a robust numerical model you would insist on testing the validity of the model with highly controlled experiments. Without the experiments, their is no predictive 'roster engineering'. Could you imagine Boeing switching from aluminum wings to carbon nanotube wings without constructing detailed stress-strain and hydrodynamic models, testing the materials and the models in wind tunnel experiments? And they wouldn't do it once, they would fine tune the models and materials, test them in experiment to make sure they were on the right track, and rinse and repeat until they got the performance they needed? And when they finally are confident in their understanding of the new materials, they go and build and fly test planes.
What baseball teams care about is much harder to test, but they don't really try. It reminds me of a meet and greet between new faculty and the provost. I was standing around feeling bored and awkward and asked the fellow beside me what his area of study was. Turns out he was a social scientist and presented the most elegant meringue fluff of a research statement. I like science to describe the stuff that doesn't recoil from a laser and art and sport to describe the rest.