Flushing away Mets fan’s ashes in MLB toilets

THIS METS fan is flushing away everything but the memories of his childhood friend.

Queens native Thomas McDonald has decided to pay tribute to his Mets-loving buddy and master plumber Roy Riegel with a novel burial: flushing his ashes down baseball stadium toilets.

McDonald, 58, has dropped some of the cremated remains of his friend in 16 Major League Baseball parks to date — and he’s got one more pilgrimage to go before his strange journey ends.

“I’ve been doing this for seven or eight years,” said McDonald, a retired NYC Transit worker. When Riegel, his best friend since childhood died April 8, 2008, McDonald was at the last home opener at Shea Stadium.

As boys, he and Riegel grew up in its shadow and spent one particularly memorable season there in 1973.

McDonald’s mother called him at the game to say that Riegel, 48, had passed away.

“One saving grace to me was he didn’t have to see Shea torn down,” McDonald said.

“We grew up since I was in the Cub Scouts when I was a little kid, known him since I was about 8. Was as big a Mets fan as I know.”

McDonald, a poet in his spare time, started taking small containers of Riegel’s ashes with him on his regular trips to ballparks around the country. At first he found discreet places outside to sprinkle Riegel’s ashes. But then, during one night at an Irish bar in Minnesota, a better idea came to him. “I went to the bathroom and I was like, I know what to do, because he was . . . the best plumber you ever saw,” McDonald told the Daily News. “He was a master.” He also carried some of the ashes with him to the Cliffs of Moher in Ireland — one of McDonald’s favorite haunts. So far, McDonald has made it to Chicago, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Detroit and Baltimore, among others. He even flushed Riegel’s ashes in the toilet of his hotel room inside the Rogers Center in Toronto.

McDonald (inset, with Riegel’s photo and ashes) has also established strict rules, such as that a game must be in progress when he puts a bit of the ashes into the toilet from a small plastic bottle, which he’s wrapped in old Mets ticket stubs.

Now, there’s only enough ashes for McDonald’s final stop: Durham Athletic Park in North Carolina, where the movie “Bull Durham” was filmed.

“They give tours of the old park that they were still using when they filmed the movie in the 1980s still there, (so I’m) going to try and do that one there,” he said.