Diamonds are forever for lifelong Mets fan
Man visits ballparks across North America to sprinkle friend’s ashes in unlikely spot
NEW YORK— The New York Mets were leading the Philadelphia Phillies, 2-1, after two innings when Tom McDonald stood up from his upper-deck seat at Citi Field.
Nature was calling, and so was his obligation to his childhood friend and fellow Mets fan Roy Riegel, whose death nine years ago left McDonald, 56, vowing to honour their baseball bonds in an unconventional way: by disposing of Riegel’s ashes in ballparks across the country.
Even more unusual was his chosen method: flushing them down public restroom toilets in the ballparks between innings.
“The game has to be in progress — that’s a rule of mine,” McDonald said one recent weeknight before entering a Citi Field bathroom, holding a little plastic bottle containing a scoopful of Riegel’s cremains.
He stepped into a bathroom stall and sprinkled the ashes into the toilet with as much decorum as the setting allowed. A couple of flushes later and Riegel’s remains were presumably on a journey through Citi Field’s plumbing.
“I took care of Roy, and I had to use the facilities myself,” McDonald said, emerging from the stall with the empty container. “So I figure, you know, kill two birds.
“I always flush in between, though,” he added. “That’s another rule of mine.”
The key here is that Riegel was a plumber, so how better to honour him than by pumping his essence into the plumbing, McDonald said, adding that he has flushed Riegel’s ashes at 16 stadiums so far while keeping journals of his trips.
“I know people might think it’s weird, and if it were anyone else’s ashes, I’d agree,” he said. “But for Roy, this is the perfect tribute to a plumber and a baseball fan and just a brilliant, wild guy.”
McDonald, who also goes by “Porky,” is a recently retired New York City Transit Authority office worker who has written about 3,000 poems, most of them about baseball, often travelling to ballparks across the country for inspiration.
With no college education or formal instruction as a writer, he has cultivated an accessible, regular-fan style that owes much to his knockaround childhood in the Astoria neighbourhood of Queens, in New York City, not far from where the Mets play — which, it should be said, is in Flushing.
McDonald and Riegel grew up a block apart and attended countless games together at Shea Stadium, which closed in 2008. As adolescents, they raced jubilantly onto the field when the Mets beat the Cincinnati Reds in Game 5 to win the National League pennant in 1973. They also suffered through many losing seasons.
A watery send-off had not occurred to McDonald when he asked Riegel’s family for a portion of his ashes shortly after his 2008 death. He originally had planned only to scatter them in ballparks and other poignant spots.
He rubbed the ashes tenderly into the asphalt of the schoolyard at Public School 70 in Astoria, where the two had played pickup baseball, football and roller hockey. He smudged them proudly onto a marker on Lower Broadway commemorating the city’s tickertape parade for the Mets after their 1969 World Series victory. He dusted them onto Shea’s original home plate location, which is designated by a marker in Citi Field’s parking lot.
But scattering the ashes at some stadiums posed problems. McDonald’s first attempt, at a Pittsburgh Pirates game in 2009 at PNC Park, was met with a gust of wind, recalled Adam Boneker, 46, a friend who has accompanied McDonald on many of his trips to ballparks to dump the ashes.
“It was awkward,” Boneker recalled, adding that they resolved to try it at the Metrodome in Minneapolis but, once there, realized that an indoor stadium was not an appropriate setting.
Afterward, at a nearby Irish pub, a frustrated McDonald excused himself to use the bathroom. He returned smiling and declared triumphantly, “‘I just took care of Roy,’” Boneker recalled.
McDonald had flushed the ashes in the bathroom.
“Right there, it hit me,” McDonald said. “After that, it just took on a life of its own.”
In the years that followed, he — often with Boneker — flushed ashes in stadiums in Arizona; Atlanta; St. Louis; Kansas City, Mo.; Toronto; Detroit; Cincinnati; Baltimore; and elsewhere.
In Cleveland, Riegel’s ashes were flushed at both Progressive Field and at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, because Riegel was a devout rocker. In Chicago, McDonald flushed them at a White Sox game but not at a game of the Chicago Cubs, the Mets’ old National League nemesis.
“It’s funny — not in a joke way — but funny that it was exactly like Roy would have wanted it,’’ McDonald said.
Over the years, a wide circle of McDonald’s friends have gotten updates on the latest disposals. “It became kind of an inside joke: What’s the best place for Roy’s ashes?” said McDonald, whose friendship with Riegel stretched back to Pack 65 of the Cub Scouts and through adulthood as the fun moved into local bars. Riegel was “a major partier,” McDonald said, and “walked that tightrope between genius and insanity.” The fast life caught up with him, and he died at 48 on April 8, 2008, the day of the home opener of the Mets’ final season at Shea.
McDonald attended the game without Riegel and returned home to find out his friend had died.
He sat down and wrote “A Final Opener, Indeed,” a poem about how the start of each baseball season would renew their childhood friendship.
“Each April, we were once again, boys in constant, cool connection,” wrote McDonald, who will read his poems next month at a symposium at the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York.
In McDonald’s Astoria studio apartment, filled with baseball and other memorabilia, he keeps Riegel’s remaining ashes in a Planters peanuts can next to a set of World Series highlight videos and McDonald’s collection of 149 autographs of baseball Hall of Famers.
For each trip, McDonald spoons some ashes into an empty Advil bottle from the can, whose exterior is wrapped in old Mets ticket stubs. He said he had enough left for one more tribute, which he plans on doing at Durham Athletic Park, the former minor league ballpark in North Carolina where the1988 movie Bull Durham was filmed.
For years, McDonald consoled himself that at least Roy Riegel never had to see his beloved Shea Stadium torn down. Only recently did he decide that Citi Field was worthy of Riegel’s ashes. And so it was with a poignant smile that he tossed the empty Advil bottle in the bathroom trash can at Citi Field the other night and returned to his upper-deck seat.
“I know he’s roaring at all this,” McDonald said.