^ The expression that applies to Palmer and Flanagan, I believe, is "can't see the forest for the trees."

Obviously Jim Palmer and Mike Flanagan know many things about baseball that I (and most of us) will never know, like what to throw Rick Burleson on a 3-2 count, or when to cover first base with Bert Campaneris bunting and Boog Powell guarding the baseline. These are valuable things to know about baseball; indeed, they are the game itself, and it would be foolish to discount them entirely.

But they're also "micro" level things, day-to-day things, and perhaps BECAUSE Palmer and Flanagan are likely to think of these things-- to think of what they felt and thought about Jim Rice, rather than analyzing Jim Rice's effect on a baseball team's offense, I think there's a limit to how much we can trust their insight into "macro" level things like the probability of scoring runs (and thus winning games) over the course of a season or career.