Reading The Puffy Taco Analysis

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. This mascot, is the original San Antonio mascot, and is announced to the crowd, he is Henry the Puffy Taco. Henry has no fascial features, or cartoonish look like most team mascots, as he is merely a taco. West, continues to explain the scenario of this crowd pleaser, which goes like this. The child and Henry the Puffy Taco, race to home plate via third base. The child …show more content…
Coyote. As anyone old enough to remember this cartoon knows how the kid (roadrunner) will be victorious every time. West also compares this race to a slapstick routine, or the birthing of a low budget theater act, from the television show America’s Funniest Home Videos and the Food Network. West also uses explains how people in San Antonio lust for food, specifically Mexican food, and of course the original restaurant that sponsored the teams mascot, which is also called, Henry the Puffy Taco. West, concludes that the tradition will continue on, even as the players and the franchises change, the Puffy Taco will always continue with future children that have yet to be born, at future seventh inning