It wasn’t the first champagne shower Trayce Thompson had been in.
But it was the first one he felt truly a part of.
“It was really cool,” the Dodgers outfielder said. “I tried to soak it in as much as possible.”
When the Dodgers clinched the NL West on Tuesday night, locking up their ninth division crown in the last 10 seasons, it set off the kind of champagne-and-beer-soaked celebration most players in their clubhouse have experienced on an almost annual basis.
Their current roster, after all, includes 20 former World Series champions and 690 combined postseason games played.
Winning the division was special. But it wasn’t exactly a unique feeling.
Thompson was a rare exception. Along with Andrew Heaney and Yency Almonte, the journeyman outfielder is one of three non-rookies on the team who has never appeared in a playoff game. There are a few others, such as Hanser Alberto and Joey Gallo, with only limited postseason experience.
For them, Tuesday’s night festivities represented something different. The division championship t-shirt and hat, the plastic wrapping and neon goggles in the clubhouse — it all resonated a little bit more.
“We were loving it,” Almonte said. “It was something new to us.”
Thompson had been part of Dodgers celebrations before.
On the club’s 2016 division-winning team, he was a breakout star during the first half of the season before having his campaign cut short by a back injury. He spent most of 2017 in the minors, but was called up in September in time to be there for another division-clinching moment.
Both times, he was in the locker room for the bottle-popping bash.
But, he acknowledged on Wednesday afternoon, before the Dodgers lost 5-3 to the Arizona Diamondbacks, “you just know deep down, it’s just not the same.”
Almonte had a similar experience in his rookie season with the Colorado Rockies in 2018.
The right-hander appeared in just 14 games that regular season, and was left off the postseason roster in favor of more experienced arms. He, too, was in the room when the Rockies locked up a playoff berth that year.
But this season is the first time he’s been a serious contributor on a playoff-bound team.
