What to make of Dinger, our prehistoric purple pal?

Just why do the Colorado Rockies have a purple triceratops as the team mascot?

Beantown residents visiting Coors Field this weekend aren’t the only folks pondering this question — so are a national television audience and even a few Rockies fans.

Dinger is the portly critter’s name, and he bears about as much resemblance to the three-horned Cretaceous-era dinosaur as your Uncle

Elbert. But there he is at every home game, cheering our team, dancing around in his jersey like a Rockette after a Stay Puft marshmallow binge, and dispensing T-shirts into the stands with a swag cannon.

Dinger’s history involves a bit of corny marketing that would have made the late baseball executive and showman Bill Veeck Jr. proud. Among other things, Veeck came up with the “exploding” scoreboard.

In January 1994, the Rockies announced the discovery of a dinosaur egg at Coors Field, then under construction. This played off the fact that an unidentified dinosaur rib bone was unearthed during the site’s excavation.

The “egg” was exhibited at the Denver Museum of Natural History, now the Museum of Nature & Science. A naming contest was held.

On April 16, 1994 — the first month of the Rockies second season — the egg was escorted into Mile High Stadium by a National Guard contingent and hatched at 12:49 p.m. Out waddled Dinger. “Wild Thing” blasted from the loudspeakers.

Reaction was decidedly mixed. Some thought Dinger, who took his hue cue from “purple mountain majesties,” was charming. Others reacted like they’d just had a mouthful of cold hot dog and stale beer.

Retired Denver Post columnist Dick Kreck, a die-hard baseball fan, thought the mascot an abomination. In a column penned soon after Dinger’s debut, he called it an “overgrown Muppet.”

“A guy in a chicken suit is funny; a guy dressed as a purple hairball is not,” he wrote. “A fan behind me commented the other night that Dinger walks like an 18-month-old with a load in its pants.”

Kreck has not mellowed. “What a waste of carpet,” he said Thursday.

Fans also questioned the dignity of Dinger’s name. It’s baseball-speak for a home run, albeit with connotations of one that barely cleared the fence. (Any fan visiting from London will really be confused, given that “dinger” is British slang for “syringe.”)

But kids took a shine to Dinger, whose gigs include promoting physical fitness and literacy at elementary schools and charitable appearances.

“He’s not cute and cuddly, and he’s not scary,” said Carla Newman, a Rockies fan and Denver resident. “He misses the mark. Why not an actual Colorado animal? Someone didn’t take three seconds to think this through.”

Dinger’s gender seems to be under wraps. But it could be argued that since public buffoonery is generally the province of the Y-chromosome crowd, the mascot is a guy.

At armchairgm.com, a sports chat room, Dinger is listed among Eight Mascots That Need to Die. Fellow honorees include Screech, the Washington Nationals‘ eagle mascot, and the Buffalo Bills’ Billy the Buffalo.

Tom Noel, history professor at the University of Colorado at Denver, is also lukewarm on Dinger.

“I kind of preferred the old Denver Bears’ bear,” he said, recalling the city’s former minor-league club and its live bruin.

“Is Dinger supposed to be a dinosaur?” Noel asked with a laugh. “Dinger’s not ferocious enough. We need a more fierce mascot, especially the way Boston is playing.”

Where did the Boston Red Sox get their name?

The Red Sox name was adopted by Boston’s American League team after the 1907 season, inspired by owner John I. Taylor’s decision that red would be the team’s official color. The team wore blue socks during the first few years of its existence and was variously nicknamed “The Bostons” or “The Boston Americans.”

A 19th-century Cincinnati team had called itself the Red Stockings, and the precedent for “Sox” came from newspaper typesetters who needed a shorter version of “Stockings” to make headlines fit.