By now, we have all heard about starting pitchers losing their effectiveness the third time through a lineup. I don't doubt that massive amounts of regular season data show that. I wonder though if there is any analysis of the fresh reliever advantage that persists during the regular season, degrading over the course of a longer series as a reliever faces the same team 3 or more times. Of course the Dodgers go to the pen early as well, but it has seemed to me over the last few years that the teams that do that as a planned strategy (especially the MFYs) have fared less well than the teams that do it out of necessity.