Brendan Marks, Mon, 29 Jun 2015 17:46:00 GMT

St. Louis Post-Dispatch columnist Joe Strauss joined The Ryan Kelley Morning After on Monday to discuss the Cardinals’ three-game sweep of the Chicago Cubs over the weekend.

We transcribed a few notable excerpts. Listen to the whole thing below:

On the Cubs:

I think the Cubs are going to be a problem next year. I think they’re going to develop and they have the resources to make moves, but they’re very young and to attach consistency to a young team for 162 games, I think you disappoint yourself a lot because it’s very difficult for a team like that to a) score consistency, which the Cubs are not doing now, or pitch consistently. I have big issues with Lester. I think he’s a flawed pitcher in this league and to the degree he’s been exposed, he’s been good, but he’s not a $26 million a year pitcher.

On the Cardinals’ bench:

You’d be pretty jaded not to appreciate what Garcia and Scruggs have done since they’ve come up and taking spots in what was a pretty threadbare bench there for a while. Scruggs looks remarkable. He destroyed the Cubs in this series. He’s not a power defender. We’ve seen that. We saw that to some degree last night. If he can just ping the ball around like he’s been doing here, I think you have to look at him as a bench guy. He does have some power and if he can improves his plate discipline enough, he can be trusted with a big at-bat.

On the Cardinals’ bullpen this year:

The Cardinals bullpen ERA is as good as anybody in the game and they do it with a pretty simple formula. Rosenthal has been better than last year and he probably can’t sustain this for the whole year. I didn’t think Rosenthal deserved a lot of the heat that he took last season He was somewhat inconsistent. He had a pattern of letting the leadoff guy on, but he was still pretty damn good a year ago and to improve on that, you basically assume the dominance of a Kimbrel, who was dominant with the Braves before he got moved to the Padres. It’s very difficult to find a flaw with what’s going on out there. A lot of that has to do with Rosenthal being consistent, Siegrist being available, there’s really no obvious weak link in that bullpen, which surprises me.

Joe Strauss Talks Cardinals on The Morning After