The good news is that San Diego Padres manager Bud Black promises a vast improvement in the club’s performance over its dismal 2008 showing. The bad news is that last year’s campaign, wherein the Pops finished 63-99, is still fresh in the public mind. The fact that Jake Peavy’s still on our mound is a huge help, of course; but the whole National League’s loopy with pitchers for 2009, which may put a premium on hitting leaguewide, and the Dads may prove deficient in that department. Then again, the new ownership may totally have ways around that. Meanwhile, Peavy’s recently been tapped for a different kind of assignment. Assuming Team USA gets to the semifinals, he’ll start at Petco Park in this year’s World Baseball Classic, which kicked off March 5 at the Tokyo Dome. The opening tilt featured China and Japan, with the winner at Petco for the March 15-19 semis. The finals are set for Dodger Stadium March 21 to 23. The remaining clubs in the 16-nation field hail from Australia, Canada, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Italy, Mexico, the Netherlands, Panama, Puerto Rico, South Africa, South Korea, Taiwan and Venezuela. (For more information, see worldbaseballclassic.com.) Of all the entrants, China looms as the most interesting. Check it out: Fully one in five human beings lives there, and the country’s online community alone is virtually as big as the entire United States (about 300 million). Sports, especially the one-on-one stuff, are wildly popular in that mammoth place, although the country flirted with a form of baseball in the 1860s. That was then. This is now — or, more specifically, 2002, when the Chinese Baseball Association was founded. The six-team China Baseball League put together a monthlong season that year, ending it with a one-game championship (the Beijing Tigers won). The league fielded a team for the 2008 Olympics that finished dead last out of eight entries, with a record of 1-6. In true baseball tradition, manager and American veteran Jim Lefebvre was ejected from the USA-China game after complaining a mite too forcefully about a collision at home plate that injured his catcher. Communist premier Mao Tse-Tung banned baseball during his Cultural Revolution of the 1960s, calling it an “evil Western influence” (although, strangely, he was nuts about basketball). That’s almost 40 years’ dormancy in a sport that calls for hair-trigger physical and mental fitness. “Baseball is a tough sell here,” said Zhou Zuyi, a sportswriter from Shanghai, who told the Los Angeles Times he’s covered games from empty stands. “Imagine nobody watching while the best of China’s players are out there… People in this country just don’t have an understanding of baseball.” Frankly, the Chinese aren’t given much chance to advance in this year’s classic. They’ve never beaten Japan, their first opponent in the series, in any kind of sanctioned tilt. But that’s OK. The point is that downtown San Diego is hosting the world in one of the latter’s beloved competitions. If China makes it to Petco, it will grace the city with a presence that elevates the sport into the realm of cultural elitism, where it most assuredly belongs.