CLEVELAND — The clubhouse was so silent in the early evening that you could have heard a pennant drop.
A few players picked at their food. A few Blue Jays looked at their phones. A few towelled off not looking at each other, most of them talking to no one.
Jose Bautista, without an answer on the field — he is 0-for-6 in the American League Championship Series, having struck out five times, having left two on base in the third inning — took no questions afterwards.
And the optimism of Thursday prior to the ALCS — how they thought this team was better and deeper than the Cleveland Indians, how their starting rotation was better, how the experience of a year ago would prepare them for this championship round, now seem like words of inconsequence after two low-scoring, punch-in-the-gut defeats at Progressive Field.