Why! Love Baseball
Boston Red Sox fan Mark Wahlberg hits it out of the park in his career and on the field. By M.B. Roberts
Mark Wahlberg, one of the biggest movie stars on the planet, has been a rapper, a model, a producer, a restaurateur and an Oscarnominated actor (his next movie is actionthriller Mile 22, out Aug. 3).
But there’s still something— and it’s baseball related—that the hardcore Red Sox fan and father of four is dying to do. No, he’s already thrown out the ceremonial first pitch at Fenway Park in 2009. This is more personal.
“I’d love to take my kids to Fenway for a playoff game or the World Series, where they can really see the intensity and the excitement,” he says. “But they’re not into it! My sons play football. That’s on my bucket list, getting my kids [Ella, 14, Michael, 12, Brendan, 9, and Grace, 8] into baseball.”
Growing up as the youngest of nine children, the Boston kid who dreamed of playing in the big leagues was all about baseball. In fact, he and his siblings, including his singeractor brother Donnie Wahlberg, often were their own baseball team.
“We played together all the time,” he says. “We’d leave the house at 7 in the morning and come back at dark. I played Little League and on a traveling team. Playing baseball was my favorite thing to do.” So was attending Boston Red Sox games.
“We got tickets in the bleachers for only two bucks,” he says. “We hung around Fenway quite a bit. There was a lot going on.”
As baseball fans know, many years after Wahlberg and his pals used to hang around Fenway as kids, things got really exciting in 2004 when the Red Sox broke “the Curse of the Bambino” (the championship losing streak that started after Babe Ruth was traded to the New York Yankees in 1919) and won their first World Series in 86 years.
“They came back and beat the Yankees [in the American League Championship Series] after being down 3-1. Then they won the World Series. It was one of those things we never thought would happen. Now they’ve done it three times.”
Wahlberg, 47, admits that he’ll watch the baseball playoffs and World Series even when the Red Sox aren’t in the mix. But what he really loves? Watching young people play.
“If I’m driving by a baseball field and there are kids playing, I’ll probably stop and watch,” he says. “That’s the purest form of the game.”