This is the first year that I've noticed this trend a lot (in a good 18 years of watching baseball coherently), and maybe because I've looked at it in a different light. But I always thought that your best reliever should pitch the 9th, your ultimate last line of defense. Now I feel that your best reliever should be used to kill any type of rally, or "momentum" (there's that danged M word again) that the other team is building. If you end that in say the 7th, or even 8th I would think that it would be really difficult to build that back up again in the 9th against another tough reliever.