As the Mariners continue to drag out the will-they-or-won’t-they-sign-Ken-Griffey-Jr. drama, the big question that should be rattling around in the head of anyone other than GM Jack Zduriencik is, "What’s the upshot in paying a past-his-prime—although, admittedly, beloved—star $5 million for one year?"

The answer for a lot of people is simple: "It’s the economy, stupid. He’ll put butts in seats." But will he? No one’s dumb enough—not even us—to say that Junior’s return to Seattle wouldn’t be a six-month, confetti-filled nostalgia party, but would that really be enough to get penny-pinching Seattleites to pack Safeco Field on a regular basis?

The fact is, if you look at the numbers, Griffey doesn’t necessarily have a great track record when it comes to putting butts in seats in Seattle. Consider these stats (crunched using the exhaustive archives at baseball-almanac.com:

From 1989 to 1999, when Junior played in Seattle, the M’s averaged a total attendance of 2,080,999 per year. (That’s including the strike-shortened ’94 season.) In the nine years since he left, they’ve averaged a total attendance of 2,953,635 per year.

Now, given the fact that if he signed tomorrow, Junior would be joining the team that will be lucky to play .500 ball, let’s look at what happens to attendance when the Mariners are losing. In seasons when Griffey played in Seattle and the M’s had a below-.500 record, the Kingdome was, on average, 40 percent full. (For that matter, the place was only a little over half-full when the team was winning.) Since then, in seasons when the M’s had a losing record, Safeco was, on average, 68 percent full.

Well, that’s not fair, you say, because Griffey played in the Kingdome, and no one wanted to risk getting hit in the head with a falling ceiling tile just to watch him. Maybe, but if the joint was only half-full when the M’s were winning, can we really say that the addition of a once-great veteran in the twilight of his career would be enough to create a noticeable uptick in attendance over the course of the season? Even more important, if Seattleites didn’t show up to see him when he played for a not-so-great team then, what’s to say that they’ll show up — consistently — to see him when his skills are diminished and he’s playing for another not-so-great team now?

Does that mean we wouldn’t love for Junior to come back and retire in Seattle? Of course not. In fact, it’d be pretty damn cool. But those hopeful fans who think he’ll create a sustained surge in ticket sales in an off-year for the team are fooling themselves.

All of which leaves one pretty big question for Junior: Is the satisfaction that you’d get from retiring in the same city where you started your career really enough to outweigh the creeping suspicion that your team would have hired you for no other reason than to use you like a carnival sideshow act—especially if no one shows up?