Boston Red Sox

Wish granted: Young Red Sox fan has amazing replica of Fenway Park in his backyard

Published Apr. 8, 2017 11:24 a.m. ET

Chris Bahr

Plenty of kids play baseball in their backyards, but not too many do so in a replica of Fenway Park. Thomas Hastings is lucky enough to say that he does.

Hastings, an 8-year-old Red Sox fan from Connecticut who was diagnosed with muscular dystrophy after his first birthday, could think of nothing he wanted more than his own baseball field when the Make-A-Wish Foundation came calling.

“Make-A-Wish’s reputation within the muscular dystrophy community is well known. … We just sat down with Thomas and said, ‘Hey, Thomas, this is your chance. Whatever you can think of, whatever you can imagine, you can ask for it,’ ” his father, Brad Hastings, said. “The one thing that kept coming up for him was a baseball field."

And then the Red Sox got involved, with head groundskeeper David Mellor leading the charge – along with much of the Hastings’ Connecticut community. Thanks to more than 100 volunteers, Fantasy Fenway was completed in only 37 days. It’s an absolute 25-percent scale model of the actual Fenway Park, and it’s spectacular – right down to the Citgo sign over the Green Monster.

Not surprisingly, Thomas was thrilled with the park and with his performance on it.

“I thought it was good and I thought I did a good job when I was pitching and I was hitting. I thought that my inside-the-park home runs were cool. And a lot of people were here, so it kind of felt like a Major League Baseball game.”

“He just loves the Red Sox more than anything else,” his mother, Mary Hastings, said. “Anything to do with baseball, I think, just takes him to an escape – something that he can just forget about everything else that’s going on because he understands the game of baseball.”