DC businesses prepare for baseball's return to Nationals Park
WASHINGTON - We’re less than a week away from the Washington Nationals home opener against the New York Mets.
This follows months of uncertainty surrounding whether there would be a baseball season due to labor negotiations between Major League Baseball's owners and players.
Fox 5 spoke to several businesses excited for the new season, some say they’ve seen an increase in customers over the past few weeks and they’ve hired extra staff to prepare for Thursday night’s game.
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This is the second baseball season for employees at Kilwin’s D.C., an ice cream and chocolate shop across the street from Nats park.
"It’s fun," Dyllan Cole said. "I like working nights when there’s a game because the people come in they’re really excited."
Cole says they’ve been ordering customer favorites to get ready for the season home opener. She told Fox 5 she remembers how busy they were last year especially after games were over; usually right before they closed.
"It’ll be like the last ten minutes and then a whole flood of people will come in and usually we’ll close at 11 but we don’t leave until like 11:45 maybe."
Kyle Farrelly, the general manager of Atlas Brew Works & Andy’s Pizza said they’ve spent the last few weeks ramping up hiring and training employees.
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"We’ve been having our own spring training and free agency period."
Farrelly says they’ve seen an uptick in customers lately.
"I think it’s just the mindset it’s spring, the cherry blossom season, people are anxious they want to get out and going to a Nats game is a great way to get out of the house and enjoy the nice weather we’ve been having in DC."
He said he’s happy to see there will be a season after all the uncertainty during the lockout.
"I got yelled at by my wife at a wedding in February for being on my phone and I was like this is work," Farrelly said. "She’s like you’re on Twitter I’m like I’m seeing what’s going on with the lockout right now I need to know, this is business."
The potential lockout had other businesses like Tap 99 concerned as well.
Fox 5 spoke to the Taproom Manager, Dylan Pagnotta.
"We kind of had to cut back on staffing because we just didn’t need a full team without the Nationals' business so now, we’ll be back and ready to go."
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Pagnotta says they have since increased staffing for the upcoming season.