Baseball has been played for about 150 years and we still get nights that make you rub your eyes. The Yankees rolled into Oakland, traded some early punches with the A's, and then the 3rd inning happened. 13 runs. 18 batters. Zero homers. It's the kind of inning that exists somewhere between historic and broken.
The early innings actually felt like a real game. The A's hung around, the score was knotted up at 3, and the Yankees were doing Yankees things — namely, mashing baseballs into the gaps and over walls. Then the bottom fell out for Oakland.
A Yankee bat tying it at 3 before the floodgates opened.
Once the 3rd flipped over, it stopped being baseball and started being batting practice. The Yankees scored 10 runs before the Athletics recorded a single out. Ten. That's not a typo and it's not a Little League score — that's a Major League team in 2026 watching the opponent send the lineup back through without so much as a popup to short.
The scoreboard ticking from 8 to 10 with the inning still showing 0 outs.
Ben Rice was the engine. Extra-base hit after extra-base hit, gap-to-gap, an avalanche from a guy who has been on a power surge anyway. The wild part is that even with all the damage — 13 runs, 18 batters — nobody actually left the yard. Every single run came from base hits, walks, and traffic. In an era where teams basically have to homer to score, the Yankees built a 13-spot the old-fashioned way.
Rice rifling another one off the wall as the score climbs to 12-3.
And then came the kicker that has genuinely scrambled brains in the Bronx orbit: the Yankees didn't get a hit in any other inning. None. Zero. They put up 13 in the 3rd and absolutely nothing in the other eight frames. It's the kind of stat line that sounds like a typo, or like somebody handed the controller to a kid and walked away.
A nod to the fact that this exact inning is going to show up as a punishment-mode challenge in MLB The Show.
Series W in the books, day off coming, and Cleveland and the White Sox heading to the Stadium. But this one's going to live in the weird-stats hall of fame for a while — a 13-run inning with no homers, sandwiched by 8 innings of absolutely nothing. Baseball, man.