The longest-running debate around Coors Field has nothing to do with whether the Colorado Rockies should have traded for a starting pitcher, or who is the team’s greatest player of all time.

Rather, some of the most passionate squabbles center around a portly and cuddly mascot, the purple triceratops known only as Dinger.

“I just think he’s kind of a dweeb,” Denverite Dan Olds said of the Rockies’ rotund spokes-dino. “The other teams like, Miles for the Broncos is kind of intimidating; Rocky for the Nuggets is fun and goofy and messes around with fans. Dinger kind of just bounces around like Barney.”

Olds is not the first to connect baseball’s purple triceratops with the purple dinosaur of kids’ TV fame. Former Denver Post sports columnist Ben Hochman once put it in writing that Dinger looks like “Barney after a meth binge.”

This poor little Mile High guy is the Rodney Dangerfield of baseball mascots. No respect.

The Dinger-bashing has gone national with a Men’s Journal article simply titled “Baseball’s Most Hated Mascots.” Whose smiling face greets you when you open the page? You guessed it — Dinger.

The dugout dino does have his own loyal, vocal backers, like Tyler Pruitt. He was born the year the Rockies unveiled Dinger, April 16, 1994 — “hatched” from a giant egg at old Mile High Stadium, where the Rockies played before Coors Field was built.

“I like Dinger, I grew up with Dinger,” Pruitt said. “When I was a kid, I would come to games and I would get to mess around with Dinger. And the fact that they made him a dinosaur because they found dinosaur bones when they were building Coors Field, I think it’s cool.”

Brady O’Neill, the Rockies’ supervisor of promotions and special events notes the “area is known for its dinosaur bones.” He also maintains Dinger’s schedule. The mascot is a big enough deal to have his own personal assistant it seems.

”The first ever triceratops that was found anywhere in the world was actually found where Auraria campus is,” O’Neill said. “So we are a hotbed of dinosaur activity. We are a dinosaur graveyard, the state of Colorado and the area around us.”

Denverite Daniel Combs gets the prehistoric connection but, “Dinger seems a bit too cartoonish.” So, what would be his ideal Rockies mascot?

“You know those YouTube videos with the big dinosaurs jumping on trampolines, getting hit by balls, stuff like that? Make that a mascot, rather than Dinger.”