Team colors: Rockies (plus ... 'What Tha?')

This was going to be a post about the one thing that I do like about the 2011 Allen and Ginter design -- the color-coded team logo in the corner. Add a splash of purple watercolor behind Huston Street and there is no doubt that this is a Rockies card. Very nice.

I'll reserve comment about purple and sports teams.

But after a little research, my post was derailed by the sight of this:

That is not one, but two Topps 2011 cards of the Rockies' Jason Hammel, who got smacked around by the Dodgers last night.

The card on the left is #338 and the card on the right is #642.

BOTH of these cards are in Topps Series 2. Neither card is some sort of leader card or "season highlight card" (Hammel is a career 5.00 ERA pitcher, you know). These are two different BASE cards of a No. 4 starter from Colorado.

Here are the backs:

Except for the card number, the head shot at top left, and the blurb on the right about whatever random card shares Hammel's TWO card numbers, the backs on each card are identical.

The reappearance of the same player in the same year has happened repeatedly in recent Topps issues. Sometimes the same player appears in the Update set, wearing the same uniform as he did in the base set. Sometimes it's the same player in Series 2 that appeared in Series 1.

But the same guy in the same series with two separate base cards?

Is 330 cards too much for Topps to handle? I don't have much of an idea on how Topps goes about a checklist for each series. But like I said on this post, Topps used to have up to six different series in each flagship set, and it was never repeating the same player.

Has someone mentioned this already? I don't understand why this keeps happening.

To me, this is much more dorky and annoying than any gimmick in any set. This is a quality control issue.

I still think Topps is sacrificing quality for quantity. With all the sets it produces, something's got to suffer. But this is just stupid. Why would I want to collect an entire base set with two different Jason Hammels?

Anyway, here is the breakdown for the colors Topps used on Rockies cards for sets in which it determined the color based on the team:

1993: purple and silver
1994: black and purple
1998: purple
2000: purple
2002: purple and silver
2003: purple and silver
2004: purple and silver
2005: purple and silver
2006: purple and gold
2007: purple and silver
2008: purple and silver
2009: silver
2010: purple
2011: purple, silver and black

Rockies team colors: Purple, silver and black
What Topps says are the Rockies team colors: Purple and silver

Well, at least Topps is on top of something.

(The tally: Purple-13, Silver-9, Black-2, Gold-1)