MLB

Who Were the Luckiest and Unluckiest Starting Pitchers in June?

Marco Estrada's month of June didn't go well. Is there any hope that he can regress back to the norm moving forward?

Now that the calendar has officially flipped to the month of July, there's no way around it -- we're officially right in the thick of the 2017 MLB regular season. We'll soon know which players are going to be starting for their respective leagues in the All-Star game down in Miami, which is the unofficial midway point of the year.

Only two pitchers will earn the honor of starting the midsummer classic, but there will be plenty of hurlers on both squads who rode a strong first half in order to earn such a meaningful individual honor. Do their numbers really line up with how they've performed, though? What about the ones who didn't get to take their talents to South Beach -- which guys performed better than their numbers suggest?

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 includes 83 hurlers.