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Will Carroll has an intriguing think piece at Wired.com about Microsoft Kinect’s potential to bring biomechanical analysis to the masses.

If you’re not familiar with Kinect, which launched last week, it’s an add-on device for the Xbox 360 that allows you to control Xbox games with your body’s movements. Unlike the Nintendo Wii, Kinect doesn’t require you to hold a wireless controller — cameras in the device track and interpret your movements. Kotaku has some good Kinect coverage if you’re interested.*

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At FanGraphs, we love baseball. And while the focus of FanGraphs is on the quantitative side of baseball, there are a lot of other things both our authors and you, our readers, enjoy besides the numbers.

That’s where NotGraphs comes in. It gives us a place to put things that would otherwise not have a place on FanGraphs, that we find interesting and we think you would also find interesting.

This doesn’t mean that we’ll be cutting back on our quantitative analysis and commentary in any way, shape, or form, but it will let us broaden our horizons a bit by looking at a wide variety of additional baseball subjects.

The blog is spearheaded by Carson Cistulli, with the current contributors consisting of Jack Moore, Eno Sarris, and Leo Martin (welcome!), with Dave Cameron and others popping in from time to time.

The Athletics recently won the bidding for Japanese pitcher Hisashi Iwakuma. Patrick Newman published some great thoughts on this pitcher who could be headed to the East Bay.

Iwakuma’s team, the Tohoku Rakuten Golden Eagles, has been around just since 2005. The team sponsor, Rakuten, owns a huge e-commerce site that is sort of Japan’s Amazon.com and is actually Japan’s second most-visited site (after Yahoo.co.jp, which is sort of Japan’s Google).

The Golden Eagles are located in Sendai, a city about three hours northeast of Tokyo that most Americans probably aren’t too familiar with. Sendai is home to numerous universities, even though its population is only about one million, and in a neat parallel to “Oakland,” its nickname is “City of Trees.” It is regarded as one of Japan’s greenest cities, featuring many bough-shaded boulevards.

Sendai offers local sports fans several options beyond baseball, including soccer (Vegalta Sendai) and basketball (Sendai 89ers). Additionally, the official municipal website boasts of the Golden Eagles stadium experience:

“The team creates new ways to make baseball enjoyable through the events for fans and entertainment found at every home game in its stadium. The stadium is turning into something more than a ballpark—a park that can be enjoyed without ball play.”

Apparently even in Japan, teams worry that baseball alone won’t fill all the seats.

As reported by the New York Times and others, Joe Morgan and Jon Miller are losing their jobs as the ESPN “Sunday Night Baseball” telecast announcers.

The Times notes that both men are Hall of Famers. To me, Joe Morgan’s Hall of Fame plaque, which he (obviously) earned as a player, seems kind of… irrelevant? in this context. Anyway, much ink has been spilled already on the topic of Mr. Morgan’s broadcasting abilities. Let’s save some with which to extol Mr. Miller.

Jon Miller was inducted the Baseball Hall of Fame — as a broadcaster, no less — just this very year. He will continue doing TV and radio broadcasts for the Giants along with postseason radio for ESPN. According to his Wikipedia page he sometimes sprinkles broadcasts with quotations from Shakespeare, which I’ve never noticed, but it sounds very romantic, and according to this Edible San Francisco interview he’s really into kombucha, which is less romantic, but still cool.

On a personal note, Jon Miller’s radio call of the final out of the World Series was my last experience of the 2010 season, and it was a perfect way to close things out. Here’s hoping that ESPN rustles up a comparable pro for next year’s “Sunday Night Baseball.”

Rick VandenHurk — along with Oriole teammates Adam Jones, Jeremy Guthrie, and some other players — is, in the giant Dutchman’s words, “on a tour of Europe to promote the game and help kids realize their dreams.”

The selfsame Dutchman is chronicling his adventures abroad via his blog, and the results are joy-ridden.

Some observations regarding VandenHurk and his prose stylings:
• He uses the words “Wauw,” “Bitterballen,” and “Appelflappen.”
• He capitalizes words in a way that, while not necessarily representative of “Standard English,” is nonetheless pleasing. For example, discussing Mariner prospect Greg Halman’s hometown, VandenHurk writes, “Haarlem is the City Were [sic] Gregory Grew up…” Also: “Baker and Gregory answered a lot of questions from the kids and helped them with their catching and Outfield Skills.”
• Seriously, though: “Bitterballen”? That’s gross, Rick VandenHurk.

H/T: Kate Wheeler of MASN