NEW YORK (AP) — Major League Baseball's average attendance rose 0.9% this season, increasing in consecutive years for the first time since 2011-12.
MLB drew 71.35 million fans over 2,413 gates for an average of 29,568, its highest since 30,042 in 2017, the commissioner's office said Tuesday.
The total was up 0.8% from last year's 70.75 million in 2,415 gates. MLB drew 64.56 million and averaged 29,295 in 2023, up from 64.56 million and 26,843 in 2022.
MLB drew 69.63 million in 2018 and dropped to 68.49 million in 2019, the last season before the coronavirus pandemic caused the 2020 season to be played without fans and much of 2021 in front of limited capacities.
Five teams topped 3 million, down from eight in 2023.
The Los Angeles Dodgers topped the major leagues at 3.94 million and have led each year since 2013, other than the 2020 season without fans.
Philadelphia was second at 3.36 million, followed by San Diego at 3.33 million, the New York Yankees at 3.31 million and Atlanta at 3.01 million.
They were followed by the Chicago Cubs at 2.91 million, St. Louis at 2.88 million, Houston at 2.84 million, Toronto at 2.68 million and Boston at 2.66 million.
St. Louis, Houston and Toronto had all been above 3 million in 2023. The Cardinals dropped by 363,000 to 2.88 million, the Blue Jays by 341,000 to 2.68 million and the Astros by 217,000 to 2.84 million.
Oakland drew a major league-low 922,286 in their final season before moving to Sacramento. The Athletics plan to spend three seasons in Sacramento and move to Las Vegas in 2028.
Miami drew 1.09 million, Tampa Bay 1.34 million and the Chicago White Sox 1.38 million in a season in which they lost a post-1900 record 121 games.
Arizona had the biggest increase after reaching the World Series, rising 381,000 to 2.34 million. Kansas City rose 351,000 to 1.66 million, Baltimore increased 344,000 to 2.28 million and Philadelphia went up 311,000 to 3.36 million.
After selling off several stars at the 2023 trade deadline, the New York Mets dropped 244,000 to 2.33 million.
MLB said ESPN's Sunday night telecasts averaged 1,505,000 viewers, up 6% and its highest since 2019. Fox's broadcasts averaged 1,879,000, up from 1,875,000. TBS's early prime time games averaged 375,000, a 2% rise.
Among viewers 18-34, MLB said ESPN Sunday games increased 12% and Fox 9%.
Games on MLB.TV were streamed for 14.5 billion minutes, up 14% from 12.7 billion last year. MLB said the number of games watched in their entirety increased 17%.
AP MLB: https://apnews.com/hub/mlb
FILE - The Baltimore Orioles and Detroit Tigers compete during a baseball game, Sunday, Sept. 22, 2024, in Baltimore. (AP Photo/Nick Wass, File)
Microsoft began laying off about 6,000 workers Tuesday, nearly 3% of its entire workforce and its largest job cuts in more than two years as the company spends heavily on artificial intelligence.
Hardest hit was the tech giant's home state of Washington, where Microsoft informed state officials it was cutting 1,985 workers tied to its Redmond headquarters, many of them in software engineering and product management roles.
Microsoft said the layoffs will be across all levels, teams and geographies but the cuts will focus on reducing the number of managers. Notices to employees began going out on Tuesday.
The mass layoffs come just weeks after Microsoft reported strong sales and profits that beat Wall Street expectations for the January-March quarter, which investors took as a dose of relief during a turbulent time for the tech sector and U.S. economy.
“I think many people have this conception of layoffs as something that struggling companies have to do to save themselves, which is one reason for layoffs but it’s not the only reason,” said Daniel Zhao, lead economist at workplace reviews site Glassdoor. “Big tech companies have trimmed their workforces as they rearrange their strategies and pull back from the more aggressive hiring that they did during the early post-pandemic years.”
Microsoft employed 228,000 full-time workers as of last June, the last time it reported its annual headcount. About 55% of those workers were in the U.S.
Microsoft announced a smaller round of performance-based layoffs in January. But the 3% cuts will be Microsoft's biggest since early 2023, when the company cut 10,000 workers, almost 5% of its workforce, joining other tech companies that were scaling back their pandemic-era expansions.
Microsoft's chief financial officer, Amy Hood, said on an April earnings call that the company was focused on “building high-performing teams and increasing our agility by reducing layers with fewer managers.” She also said the headcount in March was 2% higher than a year earlier, and down slightly compared to the end of last year.
The layoffs are hitting all parts of Microsoft's business, including the video game platform Xbox and the career networking site LinkedIn. Some laid-off workers and the executives who made the cuts took to LinkedIn to talk about them.
“This is the first time I’ve had to lay people off to support business goals that aren’t my own," wrote Scott Hanselman, a vice president of Microsoft's developer community. “I often have trouble separating my beliefs with the system that I participate in and am complicit in. These are people with dreams and rent and I love them and I want them to be OK.”
He added: "This is a day with a lot of tears.”
The company didn't give a specific reason for the layoffs, only that they were part of "organizational changes necessary to best position the company for success in a dynamic marketplace.”
Microsoft has said it has been spending $80 billion in the fiscal year that ends in June on building data centers and other infrastructure it needs to develop its artificial intelligence technology, though it has also scaled back some of those projects. Those AI tools have been pitched as changing the way people work, including in Microsoft's own workplaces.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella told Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg at an AI event last month at Meta's headquarters that “maybe 20, 30% of the code” for some of Microsoft's coding projects “are probably all written by software.”
Even if AI is increasingly helping Microsoft software engineers, however, doesn't necessarily mean it's a chief reason for laying them off.
“When these big tech companies say that they’re trimming management layers, that doesn’t really sound like it’s being driven by AI,” Zhao said. “You’re not expecting ChatGPT to replace the manager.”
Instead, cutting management ranks can often reflect a broader strategy.
“As companies grow quickly, you need to add managers who can coordinate across teams or within teams,” Zhao said. “But it’s not until things start to slow down that people start asking questions about how necessary those roles are.”
Of the laid-off employees in Washington, about 1,500 worked in person at Microsoft's offices and 475 worked remotely, according to the notice the company sent to the state employment agency. Their official last day will be in July.
After hiring sprees that started when the COVID-19 pandemic spiked demand for online services, many tech companies are still in a process of “coming back to Earth and trying to kind of rebalance some things,” said Cory Stahle, an economist at Indeed, the job listings website.
And while Microsoft isn't as directly affected by President Donald Trump's wide-ranging tariffs as some of its peers, it must also think more broadly about economic conditions that could play out over the coming months and years.
“This could be an effort to think more long term,” Stahle said. “If you have to go out and buy groceries and spend more on groceries and produce that are more expensive due to tariffs, you maybe don’t have as much discretionary income to spend on electronics or video game systems.”
FILE - A Microsoft sign and logo are pictured at the company's headquarters, Friday, April 4, 2025, in Redmond, Wash. (AP Photo/Jason Redmond, File)
