Rich Lederer of Rich’s Weekend Baseball Beat has started a series in which he’s interviewing “the game’s best analysts and bloggers.” His first interview is with Lee Sinins, creator of the Sabermetric Encyclopedia and the invaluable Around the Majors mailing list, which he uses to promote the Encyclopedia (which alas has no Mac version, so I can’t use it).

I find Lee to be a bit of a curmudgeon — his view on no-hitters is about as joyless and insufferable as it gets, and he termed the Wild Card Florida Marlins winning the pennant “a national disgrace.” Nonetheless, I respect the fact that his opinions often run against the grain — his take on “league average” versus “replacement level” is an enlightening one, for example. And I consider the work that he does on a daily basis — sifting through the headlines for baseball news and rumors, which he fortifies with his own commentary and statistical perspective — as essential as my morning cup of coffee. Countless times a single line in one of Lee’s emails has turned into a full-blown piece here. Suffice it to say that Lee’s a heavy hitter in the world of online baseball blogging, and he deserves a lot of respect for his labors.

In the interview, Rich asks Lee lots of questions about the specifics of his work and draws out the fan we readers rarely get to see; two years into receiving his mailings, I was surprised to find out Lee’s actualy a Yankees fan. Sinins also gets to voice his opinons on several players past and present, such as the one he’d chose to start the seventh game of a World Series (Pedro). Good stuff, and I’m pleased to announce that Rich has tapped me to be one of the interviewees in this series sometime in the next month or two.