The good news is that San Diego Padres manager Bud Black promises a vast improvement in the club\u2019s performance over its dismal 2008 showing. The bad news is that last year\u2019s campaign, wherein the Pops finished 63-99, is still fresh in the public mind. The fact that Jake Peavy\u2019s still on our mound is a huge help, of course; but the whole National League\u2019s 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\u2019s recently been tapped for a different kind of assignment. Assuming Team USA gets to the semifinals, he\u2019ll start at Petco Park in this year\u2019s 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\u2019s 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 \u2014 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\u2019s almost 40 years\u2019 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\u2019s covered games from empty stands. “Imagine nobody watching while the best of China\u2019s players are out there\u2026 People in this country just don\u2019t have an understanding of baseball.” Frankly, the Chinese aren\u2019t given much chance to advance in this year\u2019s classic. They\u2019ve never beaten Japan, their first opponent in the series, in any kind of sanctioned tilt. But that\u2019s OK. The point is that downtown San Diego is hosting the world in one of the latter\u2019s 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.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The good news is that San Diego Padres manager Bud Black promises a vast improvement in the club\u2019s performance over its dismal 2008 showing. The bad news is that last year\u2019s campaign, wherein the Pops finished 63-99, is still fresh in the public mind. The fact that Jake Peavy\u2019s still on our mound is a […]<\/p>","protected":false},"author":726,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"11560","_seopress_titles_title":"World Baseball Classic: culture and competition","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"jnews_override_counter":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[12360,11560,11553,11550],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-297368","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-duplicate","category-la-jolla-village-news","category-sports","category-top-stories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/297368","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/726"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=297368"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/297368\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=297368"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=297368"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=297368"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}