In Praise of Animated Food

When it opened in April 1994, the San Antonio baseball park now known as Nelson Wolff Stadium was called “the Jewel of the Texas League,” and Mickey Holt, Public Relations Director for the San Antonio Missions, still likes to call it that. It’s a definite upgrade from the former home of the Missions, V. J. Keefe Memorial Stadium – an old, primarily wooden structure still in use by the St. Mary’s University Rattlers, which looks, sadly, on first impression, like sufficiently combustible kindling for a one-match fire. When compared to the newest parks in the league, including Round Rock’s immaculate Dell Diamond and the currently-under-construction Whataburger Field in Corpus Christi, Nelson Wolff Stadium looks as if it’s from another epoch, and even though it arrived two years after Camden Yards in Baltimore revolutionized our present-day conceptions of what a baseball stadium should be, it seems a relic from the days, not so long ago, when utility trumped charm.

Holt calls it a pitcher’s park, noting that there’s an almost-constant 15 mph wind blowing in from right-center field. They’re not looking to replace it anytime soon, as it is still clean and serviceable and relatively new, but when thinking about upgrades that are realistic and might inch them closer to Dell Diamond status, Holt notes that they’d really like to get a scoreboard with a video screen, to replace the Alamo-shaped one in right field. Holt also think they should be drawing more than the 4400 a game they average, not only because San Antonio is the eighth largest city in the nation and boasts a healthy number of sports fans, but because the Missions are downright good, having won Texas League championships in 2002 and 2003. Certainly, it doesn’t escape you, if you attend a game in the 2004 season, that they’re back-to-back champions – their marketing campaign is built around this phrase, appearing on the scoreboard, and on shirts, and on the jersey of their official mascot, an anthropomorphic jalapeño pepper with googly eyes named Ballapeño.

Riding out in the middle of the first inning on a motorized scooter, the Ballapeño indulges in the sort of fun, wacky mascot antics you’d expect of a mascot playing to 4400 a night who’ve come to watch Double A players with big league aspirations. He rides in the back of a truck around the perimeter of the field and shoots rolled-up T-shirts into the crowd as the truck loops its way past the infield seats. He dances on top of the dugout. He wanders into the crowd, pulls caps off children’s heads playfully, and slaps hands with adults who cannot resist the pull of a giant jalapeño pepper with googly eyes.

But at the end of the sixth inning, another, more mysterious mascot heads to second base, to the instant recognition and obvious delight of the crowd. This is the Missions’ unofficial mascot, who has been with the team since a local restaurant sponsored him to come out to V. J. Keefe back in 1988 for a series of promotional appearances. Two years ago, Newsweek named him the minor league mascot of the year (even though Ballapeño has been the official Missions mascot since Opening Day of the 2000 Season) and one look at him is all it really takes to understand why.

Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you: Henry the Puffy Taco.

The Puffy Taco very nearly defies conventional mascot wisdom. Typically, mascots are cartoonish depictions of people or animals or even objects, yet they wear distinctive human features like eyes and a mouth. It’s for the same reasons that babies and baby animals come into the world cute – to start the process of attachment, to allow the parents to want to care for it. Even the Corpus Christi Hooks, who will begin Texas League play in 2005, have started their marketing campaign by floating out a logo which appears to be a giant fishing hook with eyes and a mouth, and it wouldn’t at all be surprising if this gets committed to fabric and is set in motion to wander the stands next spring.

But the Puffy Taco doesn’t even try for recognizable facial features. It is, simply, resplendently, without pretense, a taco. More precisely, the costume is an open shell facing forward and standing on its end, with holes for the arms and legs to protrude from the shell. Because there’s no better way to describe this, vulva-like folds of lettuce and cheese protrude slightly from behind the open folds of the shell, all but enveloping the dark-red cylinder at the center of the taco, which is clearly where the actor’s head and torso fit, and which has to be meant to represent the meat at the center of the taco, although this would make the costume more of a hot-dog taco than a ground beef taco. “Henry the Puffy Taco” is stitched along the back of the taco shell at its bottom edge, for the four or five people in the audience on any given night who need clarification on who this is.

The Puffy Taco’s act is simple yet effective, and is a thirty-second case study in everything that is glorious yet low-rent about minor league baseball – that, indeed, is glorious precisely because it is so low-rent. The Puffy Taco starts at second base, and runs for home plate by way of third. A child is selected from the audience; it is his or her job to tackle the Puffy Taco before he reaches home. There’s a Roadrunner and Wile E. Coyote certainty to the act; it always concludes with the child tackling the Taco, and the show has evolved to incorporate an additional moment of triumph in which the child is allowed to clamber on top of the Taco and lift his or her hands skyward to make the “raise the roof” gesture. I think you can probably figure out what the crowd does in response.

Then, the Taco gets up and does a dance, and circulates through the stands for another half-inning or so, slapping hands and greeting the kids who flock around him, before giving the stage over to the Ballapeño for the rest of the evening.

The Taco’s act has evolved on its own over time. Initially, there was no tackling – as Holt explains, the first tackle was actually an accident born of some overzealous kid bumping into the Taco during a race. What was ordained from the beginning was that the kid was always supposed to win. Holt recalls that on the one occasion the Taco won the race, when the Taco’s act was still in its early stages of development, the crowd reacted with enough booing and general displeasure to assure that that wouldn’t ever be happening again. . Over time, the two concepts – kid always triumphs, kid triumphs by tackling the Taco before he reaches home plate – merged into what is now the standard nightly ritual.

As mascot theater goes, the Taco’s act is simple and slapstick and interactive and allows a child to emerge triumphant in a situation that is not quite man v. beast but is similar enough to evoke feelings of top-of-the-food-chain superiority and the resultant joy that comes with that. For San Antonians, there’s an additional level to why the victory over the Puffy Taco works as a gimmick, and that has a lot to do with the fact that people in San Antonio really like their food.

The current mayor of San Antonio, Ed Garza, who is still in his early thirties yet was reelected to a second term in 2003, has been moved by a series of Men’s Fitness polls perennially listing San Antonio as one of the fattest cities in the nation to push something called the Fit City Initiative. But there’s a larger, easier, more informal movement that Fit City is pushing against, which will probably emerge triumphant at the end of the day, and that’s the citywide drive to eat a lot of fattening food, often in public.

Every April, the city essentially shuts down for a 10-day conglomeration of festivals and parades called Fiesta. At the heart of the 100-plus Fiesta events are two major parades which draw as many as half a million spectators and are serviced by a staggering number of makeshift festival food stands. The Night in Old San Antonio event, which runs four days in the city’s La Villita and is another major Fiesta draw, allows its thousands upon thousands of annual attendees a chance to eat and drink with abandon. There’s music and dancing and street festival frivolity to be had here, but ask any attendee, and they’re more likely than not to tell you they are there for the variegated meats on a stick or the gorditas or the fresh handmade tortillas or the bratwurst or crepes or frog legs or potato skins or any number of the other foods on display.

The night before the first Krispy Kreme franchise opened in San Antonio, a line began forming outside its doors; by morning, 500 people had gathered, having camped out all night for access to the first hot, sticky, rings of fried dough to roll off the assembly lines and into their waiting mouths.

And every year in late January, right before the annual San Antonio Stock Show and Rodeo, a loose coalition of organizers host a Friday morning Cowboy Breakfast. Even though it has moved from location to location in the last few years, the annual Cowboy Breakfast always draws in the neighborhood of 40 to 50 thousand, no matter what the conditions outside, to gather in the early morning hours for food that is, in a particularly important calling card to the people of San Antonio, free. The San Antonio Express-News article on the 2004 Cowboy Breakfast, with reporter Lisa Marie Gomez following in the well-worn path of previous reporters’ stories on the event, begins this way:
The drizzle, patchy fog and 49-degree weather at 5 a.m. Friday were quickly forgotten when the bands blared their tunes and hot coffee and food were served. The Cowboy Breakfast was in full swing at Crossroads of San Antonio mall two hours before the sun made its debut for the day, and traffic piled up as if it were the evening rush hour. Despite the morning darkness and the cool weather, families came out in droves. One family piled into a van, with children, cousins, and even grandparents. “We’re here for the free food,” Wicho Guerra said as he munched on a slice of white bread drowned in gravy. “I have no idea what I’m eating, but it’s good.”

So it is clear that the Fit City Initiative has a way to go. Tourism, after all, is one of the city’s largest industries, and food is at the backbone of San Antonio’s allure for locals and visitors alike.

The Puffy Taco mascot gets its name from a Tex-Mex innovation that has been adopted by a number of the city’s vast array of Mexican restaurants. Specifically, it was Jamie Lopez, the son of the Henry’s Puffy Tacos owner, who came up with the idea for the Puffy Taco mascot in 1988 as a way to further associate the puffy taco dish with his dad’s restaurant. Henry’s Puffy Tacos, a Westside restaurant which opened in 1978 and relocated to a former Luby’s cafeteria around the corner in 1996, naturally lays claim to its title dish despite having many other offerings on the menu.

The puffy taco is a crispy taco with a shell that puffs up in the deep-frying process, filled to bursting with meat, lettuce, tomatoes, and cheese. A Citysearch review of Henry’s noted, “The shell of Henry’s signature dish is what newly fallen snow would feel like in your mouth – if it was fried.”

If you’re wise, and if you’re throwing caloric caution to the wind as you should be when you order the puffy taco, you’ll want to top it with sour cream and guacamole and salsa. Eating it is a messy affair, and is not so much a meal as it is a mainlining of fatty, spicy goodness. It’s a safe bet that Wicho Guerra and his clan have sprung for a dinner here at some point in their gastronomical journeys. And though they may not know exactly what they’re eating when they plunge into their puffy tacos, it’s safe to say they will determine it is, indeed, good.

But because Henry’s is far from the well-trafficked tourist haunts of the city, on a major arterial that cuts through a working-class, predominantly Mexican-American neighborhood, the Puffy Taco is a bit of a mystery to those tourists who find themselves taking in a Missions game at Nelson Wolff. A writer for minorleagueballparks.com, writing a review of the stadium in 1999, wrote, “I didn’t like the fact that the ‘Puffy Taco’ mascot was actually an advertisement for a fast-food chain,” and a scribe for ballparkreviews.com expressed disappointment that the Puffy Taco only makes his one appearance, despite “hearing much hype” about him.

Wesley Ratliff understands the tradition, though. At just 24 years old, Ratliff is the community outreach director for the Missions, which is an official way of saying that he is a professional mascot. He pulls double duty during each Missions home game, portraying both the Puffy Taco and Ballapeño, which is why they rarely appear in the same place at the same time.

Ratliff personifies the duality of San Antonio’s version of Generation Y perfectly – he sports a goatee and a tongue piercing that suggests a straight-from-MTV mainstream edginess, yet he’s unfailingly polite, responding to a number of questions from my interview with him with a demure and polite, “Yes, sir.”

Ratliff already has a long, impressive resume as a mascot. He started out as Eloc, the cougar mascot for Cole Junior/Senior High School, located on the Fort Sam Houston U.S. Army base, and best known as the alma mater of Shaquille O’Neal. Ratliff then moved on to serve as a mascot for the University of the Incarnate Word, one of San Antonio’s four-year Catholic universities, wearing one of the nation’s first inflatable costumes. He later moved on to professional mascothood at two of San Antonio’s prime theme parks, Sea World and Six Flags Fiesta Texas, and later realized a lifelong dream of performing at Walt Disney World, taking a whirlwind tour in which he was allowed to portray Tigger, Eeyore, Gepetto, Tweedledee, Tweedledum, and Miss Piggy over the course of several weeks.

His new lifelong dream, fed by his two full-time years and six part-time years with the Missions, is to make it into the big league mascot ranks; last year, he was in the running to take over as Raymond, the mascot for the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, which he describes somewhat perplexedly as “a sort of hairy troll thing.” He was one of two final candidates, and was ultimately the odd man out, but it’s clear that missing out on the chance to depict a hairy troll for one of MLB’s most moribund franchises might be a blessing in disguise. Ratliff graciously opines that it was an honor just to be in the running.

He’s also suffered for his art, having two surgeries on his knee for a torn meniscus – the first was the result of being tackled while portraying the Taco, the second came after a car accident aggravated the fragile ligament. The first actor playing the Puffy Taco also suffered a similar knee injury, leading one to believe that what a fifty-pound-child lacks in mass and force in tackling the Taco, he or she more than makes up for it in questionable technique, and is perhaps the prime occupational hazard for those with the calling to be a mascot.

Ratliff, despite the trick knee, is fortunate in that he is able to carve out a living as a professional mascot – a number of his colleagues on the Texas League circuit are actually salespeople within their respective organizations, moonlighting as the mascot in the sort of double-duty that isn’t at all surprising given the limited budgets of many minor-league teams.

And unlike a number of the other minor-league mascots toiling away in obscurity, Ratliff has at least enjoyed a fleeting yet memorable taste of the bigs. Last year, for fan appreciation day for the Missions’ parent organization, the Seattle Mariners, Ratliff was invited to Safeco Field where he performed as both the Ballapeño and Puffy Taco alongside the Moose, the Mariners’ lovable yet improbable mascot. The Moose, a land animal representing a team with a decidedly nautical theme, is the one enduring remnant from the team’s former owner Jeff Smulyan of Indianapolis-based Emmis Communications – a chapter of Seattle baseball history that many Mariners fans would just as soon forget.

Ratliff recalls his reception as nothing short of rock star. As the Taco, he accompanied the Moose for a G-rated version of running the gauntlet – being doused with water by Mariners players in a ritualized procession across the field. He reports that the crowd responded instantly when he came out, and later, he signed autographs for a crowd of fans waiting as long as 45 minutes in line to meet him.

He also learned, on this trip, that he has it pretty good in the minor leagues. Mascots in the majors are bound by a longer list of rules than he’s bound by. The Colorado Rockies mascot, also on hand at Safeco for Fan Appreciation Day is bound to stricter rules than the Moose – or, for that matter, Ratliff himself. The Rockies’ mascot can’t be on the field after the ceremonial first pitch, and can’t be on the dugout ever. Ratliff, by contrast, pretty much has license to go whenever he wants wherever he wants, allowed to read the crowd and create his moments as he pleases.

For all the love the Puffy Taco and Ballapeño receive, San Antonio’s heart belongs to another mascot, basically because its heart belongs to another team.

Despite the century-plus history of minor league baseball in San Antonio, and despite having one of the most rabid high school football fan bases in football-obsessed Texas, San Antonio is a basketball town, and every other sport is thus relegated to being not-basketball. The Spurs have only been around since 1973, but because the team is the city’s highest-profile professional sports franchise, it enjoys a unique and revered position among San Antonians, and this extends to mascots, as none is more recognizable or more beloved than the Coyote.

Tim Derk, who debuted The Coyote in 1983, suffered a stroke this past March and has had to turn the job of playing the Coyote to understudies while he undergoes rehabilitation -- ending a 21-year run of donning a coyote mask with bulging bright green eyes and an easy-going, yet slightly maniacal, permanent grin.

The stroke not only sidelined Derk – it led him, his family, and the Spurs organization to do the unprecedented thing and reveal The Coyote’s identity to the public. For many, it was the first time they’d learned who Tim Derk was, and was also the first time they’d learned to separate Derk as someone distinct from The Coyote.

Derk’s condition was major news in San Antonio, dominating headlines and local newscasts for several days. The reaction showed that San Antonio, for all its aspirations to be a big city, is still a small town, in the good sense, at its core. Though we generally like our mascots anonymous in day-to-day life, and transformed into the lovable character when safely encased in the costume, there was no question of Derk’s family and the Spurs organization going public with the information. There was an overwhelming need to know, evinced by the media barrage and the remarkable groundswell of public support once Derk’s condition was made public, which easily overrode the typical willingness of a fan base to buy into the suspension of disbelief manifest in engaging with a mascot.

The Coyote has remained a fixture at Spurs games even while Derk continues rehab, and now, Derk’s legacy and years of service adds an additional layer of legend to The Coyote. It wouldn’t at all be surprising if his number (the cryptic “2!” – standing for “too excited”) is retired should Derk decide not to resume his role as The Coyote – though he’s not ruling out a return to the court, depending on how his physical therapy sessions go.

What the situation with The Coyote reveals, aside from the connection that fans have with a mascot, is the importance of the mascot in articulating the team’s identity, even beyond the role it might have had in years past. If you’re looking to point fingers as why it’s harder for teams to bank on the marketability of its star players, look no further than the era of free agency.

As a fan in his mid-30s, I might just be part of the last generation to know what it’s like to see a favorite player remain with a favorite team for the entirety of his career.

As a Mariners fan, I have seen Ken Griffey, Jr. go from Seattle fan favorite to trade-me malcontent, and now, I’m more likely to remember his statistical disappearing act as an oft-injured Cincinnati Red than as part of the Mariners’ feel-good father-son duo that once hit back-to-back home runs in a game on (and this is so terribly fitting) Father’s Day.

As a Mariners fan, I have seen Randy Johnson develop from wild-man anomaly to one of the most feared left-handed power pitchers in the history of the game – and then saw him help deliver a World Series to the Arizona Diamondbacks, a team that entered the majors as an expansion team long after the Mariners. (Note: it is not lost on me that the Mariners are closing in on three full decades of futility.) In July 2004, the Diamondbacks publicly contemplated trading him, and Johnson hinted, not so subtly at all, that he’d like to become a Yankee. This was particularly cruel for Mariners fans who still remember his role in defeating the Yankees in a five-game divisional series in the ’95 playoffs, a series which was not only deliciously epic, but pretty much allowed Mariners fans to hate the Yankees with a blend of loathing and jealousy only surpassed by Red Sox fans.

And I have seen the worst free-agency jump of all, for Mariners fans or otherwise, in Alex Rodriguez. A-Rod was drafted by the Mariners, came up quickly through the team’s farm system, was a wide-eyed September call-up in uniform for the ’95 playoffs, became the team’s most crucial player during its high-water mark as an organization, and then left for a $252 million contract (from a division rival, no less) that could be characterized by any reasonable observer as either obscene or insane. After several years of insisting money was not the motivating factor, even though he toiled for the Texas Rangers through several moribund seasons, he was jettisoned to the only team that could take his monstrous contract – the hated Yankees.

For minor league fans, inconstancy in the roster is a heartbreak that comes with the territory. It’s no accident that the minor leagues are referred to as the farm system – players are nurtured and then harvested, the wheat is separated from the chaff, and the cycle repeats itself annually.

But for major league fans, the free agent market has brought on an inconstancy that they assumed (correctly, up until now) they were immune from. Which makes the mascot more than just a sideshow to fill time and amuse the kids between innings – the mascot has become, more than any individual player, the face of the franchise, the one personality guaranteed to return year after year. The most dedicated baseball fans, addicted to statistics and the hope that comes with spring training, have turned to rotisserie leagues to insure that they can be in control of players maintaining their allegiance to teams – even if those teams are mere constructs in infinite variations among thousands upon thousands of makeshift coalitions around the nation.

But, paradoxically, in the real world, the most enduring representative of what the team embodies is not a five-tool outfielder with a distinctive batting stance, or a pitcher with enough guile and raw talent to change the outcome of a game with his multi-million dollar arm, but a moose with a comically-large head, or an electric-blue marlin, or a non-descript green monster with a nose that vaguely resembles a trumpet. The pitcher and the outfielder might be dealt for prospects in the closing days of July, or might bolt to a contender at the first opportunity that MLB’s free agency rules afford them. The mascots, though, save for a conscious redirection of the team’s marketing people, are there to stay.

San Antonio is a city where people tend to settle in and grow old, and indeed, where multiple generations spend entire lifetimes. It’s a city where traditions are taken very seriously, where the two biggest institutional influences are the military and the Catholic Church. What this means, even with the rise of the Ballapeño, even with the rare convergence of animated jalapeño and animated taco in the same space, is that the Puffy Taco isn’t going anywhere. It’s perhaps no accident that Mickey Holt notes, “If we ever got rid of the Puffy Taco, we’d be crucified.

Yet, in talking to Wesley Ratliff, you get the sense that he will inevitably move on. He’s just entered his mid-20s and has already been a mascot for almost a decade. He’s come agonizingly close to toiling for Tampa Bay fans this year as a non-descript troll. He’s already had a glimpse of life as a big-league mascot, and he likes it. If anyone is cut out for the mascot’s life, Wesley is that person.

When Wesley moves on, the costumes will remain behind – a jalapeño with googly eyes, and a taco with no eyes – waiting to be worn by someone who remain, if all goes to plan, anonymous. Though a different person will embody the role, the bio info on the team’s official website will remain the same, in the jokey tone and cadence that is common to mascot bios at all levels of the game.

And it’s a safe bet that years from now, between the 6th and 7th inning of future Missions games, the Puffy Taco will take his place at second base, and a child currently not yet born will take his or her place alongside the Taco. They will run around the bases. The Taco will not make it to home plate, being tackled along the way. It will be someone else’s knees taking the torque, enduring another child’s zeal. And as the Taco lies on the ground, to the cheers of the crowd for another in a chain of consecutive nights, the Taco will know his place is secure. In a city where traditions rule all, and in which the Taco has become a quirky and enduring tradition, no one will let the Taco escape this mortal coil. Even today, between the 6th and 7th inning as the Taco makes his entrance, underneath the cheers, you can hear a handful of people quickly explaining to those who don’t yet know – the children, the visitors, the neophytes – the answer to the inevitable question, the variations on the theme of What the Hell Is That.