Last night, Ken Griffey joined an elite cadre of baseball players: those few (6 in total) who have hit 600 home runs. What does that mean to baseball? Well, according to some little known research done earlier this year by former major league consultant David Gassko, it means 1,200,000 extra tickets sold, for starters.

How is this possible? Well, to understand this answer it's helpful to understand Gassko's research. About ten years ago, in the dark days after Baseball's 1994 strike, the story goes that the sport was saved by the now fabled Mark McGwire/Sammy Sosa home run chase. Nike sort of commemorated the moment with a late-90s TV commercial, featuring Greg Maddux and Tom Glavine, both training hard for one reason: to hit one over the fences. At the commercial's end, Maddux gives their reasoning: "chicks dig the long ball."

And there you have it: baseball's mythological link between attendance and home runs.

What Gassko wanted to know was just how mythological was this link really. On the surface, looking at a chart measuring home runs and attendance from 1970 to 2007 we see a correlation, but not much of one. "Overall," says Gassko, "the correlation between year-to-year change in home run rate and the year-to-year change in attendance per game is .37-significant, but not particularly strong. More importantly, that number is rendered meaningless by an old statistical axiom: "Correlation does not imply causation."

So Gassko decided he needed was a much finer lens for examination. He did everything from adjust for variables like whether a team made the playoffs last year or were they playing in a new stadium or how many wins they had the previous season. He translated all of these numbers into a league average and then translated those into 2007 numbers.

What did he learn? "Each win in a season adds almost 31,000 fans in attendance that season and 15,000 the next. Making the playoffs is worth about 250,000 extra fans in attendance the next year, while winning the World Series adds 160,000 on top of that. A new stadium is worth about 700,000 extra fans, while an expansion franchise sees more than 600,000 extra fans in attendance in its second year."

And for home runs? Well, each one puts 2000 more butts in the seats. This makes for some serious cash. In fact, each home run is worth (again using that $25.40 number) exactly $50,800 dollars to Major League baseball.

What's ironic about all of this is that all of baseball's steroid scandals have been fueled by this same desire to hit more homeruns. Barry Bonds didn't go in for a tube of the "cream" or the "clear" because he was interested in helping his fielding. He wanted to break Hank Aaron's record; he wanted the long ball. So the next time someone says "steroids are ruining baseball," understand that while they might mean the game of baseball (though attendance numbers don't bear this out), they certainly don't mean the business of baseball. Which is to say, if you use the 2008 average ticket prices of $25.40, then Ken Griffey's long ball ways have earned the business of baseball over 30 million dollars.