Beat! beat! drums!—blow! bugles! blow!
Through the windows—through doors—burst like a ruthless force,
Into the solemn church, and scatter the congregation;
—Walt Whitman

The other day, the Yankees trailed 5-1 with ten strikeouts after seven innings against KC's Luke Hudson. The Royals lifted Hudson for Jimmy Gobble, and the Yanks went on to score ten runs in the top of the eighth en route to a 12-5 win. The Royals switched pitchers twice before they registered an out, and they eventually went through four pitchers in the inning. The Yankees amassed seven hits, two of which were homers, and three walks—and zero left on base—on the inning.

It made me wonder what were the fewest runs ever scored by a team that had a 10-run burst. It turns out that there have been 123 games in baseball history in which a team scored ten runs in one inning and no more than two in the rest of the game. There were 25 games in which a team was shutout out for an entire game besides a ten-run outburst, the last being a 10-2 win last year by the Phils over the Marlins with all ten runs coming in the top of the inning.

Here are all 25 games. You'll note that two ended up losses for the team scoring the 10-run burst:

At the other end of the spectrum, there have been 39 games in baseball history in which a team scored at least ten runs besides a ten-run one-inning outburst. Here are the ones with the most runs scored outside of the big burst inning:

In the 378 ten-run innings in baseball history (hopefully I didn't miss any this season—I had to eyeball the data), the big-inning team won 372 times or 98.4% of the time. On average, the big-inning team scored 10.74 runs in their big inning and 4.62 outside of that inning. In fact, they were outscored on average by their opponent (5.10 runs) by about one-half run—of course, they had an extra inning in which to score it.

Also, the fifth inning has the most 10-run outbursts (56) followed by the first and eighth (both 50). The ninth has the least (23), which seems anticlimactic but, considering that the home team often does not bat in the bottom of the ninth, makes sense. There were just two ten-run innings in the ninth by the home team. There have also been three ten-run innings after nine innings.

Here's the breakout by inning:

Here are the two ninth-inning outbursts by the home team, one of the two being a loss:

Now, here are the extra-inning, 10-run innings:

Earlier this season, the same Royals that get slammed by the Yanks' ten-run eighth the other day, scored ten runs in the bottom of the first and still lost, 13-15 in the tenth to the Indians. According to the Royals site and their outmoded Elias data, it was just the second time in baseball history that a team scored ten runs and still lost the game. Of course, I found four other games, three of which came in 1912 and all of those were big nine-inning rallies:

Finally, to beat this dead horse a bit more, here are the only games in which a team scored ten runs in an inning twice, one being the classic Cubs-Phils 26-23 game in 1922:

Here is the only doubleheader in which a team had a ten-run inning in both games:

Here's the only game in baseball history in which both teams scored ten runs in an inning:

Here are the only days in which ten runs were scored in one inning in two separate games:

I guess I have to stop now since I can't think of another way to milk this data.