Thanks to two men with deep ties to Boston and the Red Sox, the medical staff at a local hospital will be given four lifetime tickets to games.

Actor John Krasinski invited five members of the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center COVID-19 unit on his “Some Good News” online show and surprised them with an appearance by David Ortiz, the former Red Sox slugger whose emotional “this is our (expletive) city” speech helped it recover after the Boston Marathon bombing.

“We’re all missing baseball season, but that doesn’t mean I can’t bring baseball to you,” Krasinski said. Then he introduced Big Papi, who announced that the team would donate four tickets for life to, as Krasinski put it, to be shared by “you and everybody at Beth Israel.”

Ortiz thanked the workers “from the very bottom of my heart” and they were taken to Fenway Park on one of the city’s famous duck boats, “the most sanitized duck boat in America,” as Krasinski put it. They walked onto the field and threw out a ceremonial first pitch.

“I thought I was a big deal,” Krasinski joked, “but I’ve been waiting on the wait list (for tickets) for 16 years and have still heard nothing. I might be able to get Big Papi, but I don’t get the Big Papi treatment.”

A Newton, Massachusetts, native and lifelong Red Sox fan, Krasinski has long played up his roots, notably in a Super Bowl commercial in February and in a New Era ad that pitted him against Yankees fan Alec Baldwin. Bostonians rallied around Ortiz after his spirited address on the field at Fenway when the baseball season opened after the Marathon bombings.

“The way the city bonded together, the way we supported each other and rose to the occasion to send out the message that we are much, much stronger than any one event is what’s always most impressive about being from Boston,” Krasinski said at the time.