Baseball, aside from sandlot or little league, is vastly more sophisticated than what you describe. 90% of what happens in a baseball game does not happen on the field, but in the minds of the managers and coaches.
I agree with you about NBA basketball, though. I used to be a huge NBA fan back in the 1980s when Magic, Bird and Jordan, among others, displayed superb fundamentals and could play the game flawlessly. Today's NBA is slammajamma-did-you-see-my-highlight-on-SportsCenter crapola. Players can't play defense, make jumpshots or even pass well. Of all the pro sports, basketball has actually devolved to a lower form over the years.
The problem is 90% of a player's time during a baseball game is spent doing nothing. They're waiting for their turn at bat, or waiting for the batter to actually hit the bloody ball so that maybe, if play goes in their direction, they can do something. and what you said just proves my point, yes the coaches and managers get to do all kind of interesting stuff, but the players primarily do what they're told. In soccer and hockey it's the PLAYERS working out how they're going to react to the other team and more imporatantly how they're going to force the other team to be reactionary. In baseball you've got 5 guys strategizing, and three of them are coaches, in soccer you've got 12 guys strategizing and 1 of them is a coach. Just by the number of people making decisions and the level of participation they take in the game you can see that soccer is a more complex sport than baseball.
And in the end the heart of baseball is the mano-a-mano pitcher batter duel, nothing else that happens on the field matters if the batter can't put wood to the ball. A classic example of this was the first game the Marlins won in their series against the Cubs, the Cubs had 29 at bats in the entire game, there's probably at least two members of the Marlins' starting line-up that never actually touched the ball in a defensive manner, the pitcher pitched the whole game so the bullpen didn't matter at all. And with only 29 at bats frankly nothing my beloved Cubs did on either side of the ball mattered. One pitcher, in series and repeatedly, beat every batter on the Cubs, except for one walk and one lucky base hit. And it was a beautiful game, one of the best games I've ever watched even though it destroyed my team, and it didn't have enough subtlety in it to fill a thimble. And of course that pitcher got the start because it was his turn in the rotation, so it wasn't even like the coach said "let's give him the ball and see what happens", it was his turn and he dominated, we won the one-on-one chess match 27 times out of 29 attempts. Doesn't get much simpler.