In this piece, I’ll be reviewing one of my favorite strategies to identify starting pitchers to consider trading (or “selling high,” as some continue to refer to it) or avoiding on the trade market for fantasy baseball in 2014.

Each and every baseball site you visit can probably provide you with a strategy to identify players to target or avoid via trade. One of my favorite statistics to look at for pitchers is ERA-FIP on FanGraphs. ERA-FIP provides users with the difference between a starting pitchers current earned run average and their fielding independent pitching. According to FanGraphs, Fielding Independent Pitching “measures what a player’s ERA should have looked like over a given time period, assuming that performance on balls in play and timing were league average.” Moreover, FanGraphs suggests that “FIP does a better job at predicting the future than measuring the present, as there can be a lot of fluctuation in small samples.”

The idea here is to look for pitchers whose ERA appears to be outperforming their FIP. These may be players that have been “lucky” to start the season, but theoretically should regress to the mean and fail to maintain that level of success as the season wears on. In addition to looking for players with higher ERA-FIPs, I’ll take a look at the BABIP, K% and BB% to guide my search.

Here are the top 50 pitchers whose FIP is greater than their ERA:

I’ll be back with some general findings/analysis later, but I’m looking to sell/avoid guys with a K-BB% less than ten percent in addition to their negative ERA-FIP.