Ah, the dog days of August are officially upon us. And now that the non-waiver trade deadline is in the rearview mirror, we can truly focus on teams who are going all in for a chance at reaching October this season. A new month brings a clean slate for everyone, but it's always important to take a quick look back on the month that was to see who performed well and who didn't.

However, it's even more important to see how players arrived at the numbers they eventually produced.

On the pitcher’s mound, the most common statistics we see thrown around include win-loss record, ERA and WHIP, but we all know there’s more to individual performances than that.

With that in mind, we’re going to compare their ERA to their Skill-Interactive ERA (SIERA).

According to FanGraphs, SIERA attempts to measure the underlying skill of a hurler. Unlike FIP and xFIP, SIERA doesn't ignore balls put in play, and it also attempts to give a more accurate picture as to why certain pitchers are better than others. A good SIERA is just like a good ERA -- the lower the better.

For this exercise, we'll be looking at qualified starting pitchers from the past month, as determined by FanGraphs, which consists of 86 hurlers.