In the essay “Reading the Puffy Taco,” Phil West explains the history and tradition behind the mascot of the San Antonio Texas’s minor league baseball team, the Missions. In the year of 2000, the Missions debuted their new mascot, Ballapeno. Like all team mascots, Ballapeno’s job is to engage the crowd with fun, madcap antics, such as shooting off team t-shirts into the crowd from an air cannon, wanders through the crowd monkeying around with the fan’s along with their children. The tradition however, comes at the end of the sixth inning, another more baffling mascot emerges, and walks out toward second base. The crowd of approximately 4,000 fans goes wild, as this mascot makes its way to second base to meet up with a child picked from the crowd.…