Though right-hander Keegan Thompson spent the entirety of the 2025 season at the AAA level within the Chicago Cubs organization, the Cincinnati Reds signed him to a major league deal earlier on Tuesday.
Thompson, 30, does have ample big league experience, however. A former 33rd round pick of the Detroit Tigers and later a 3rd rounder by
the Cubs out of Auburn University, he’s appeared in 104 MLB games since the start of the 2021 season – all with Chicago – and pitched to a tidy enough 3.64 ERA across 227.1 IP. He’s made 23 starts in that time despite all of those coming in 2021-2022, and his most recent big league season (2024) saw him post career best marks in ERA (2.67), FIP (3.86) and WHIP (1.22).
He relies heavily on a fastball/cutter combo more often than not, his fastball sitting around 94 mph while his cutter is just under 90, though he will work in a slider and curveball alongside the once-in-a-thousand sinker/change. Word is he’ll get roughly $1.3 million from the Reds in this 1-year contract that appears to be a split deal, as MLB.com’s Mark Sheldon relayed on Bluesky.
Of course, doling out this kind of coin to a guy their direct division rivals held in the minors and then released is eyebrow-raising in its own right. Clearly the Reds see something in him they think they can fix, and I applaud them for jumping on this so quickly if that’s the case. Still, it sure does look like they are trying to address the major holes in their bullpen by diving directly into the bargain bin, and that’s hard to ignore.
It’s impossible to ignore in the context of the rest of today’s Reds news, too.
Per C. Trent Rosecrans of The Athletic (and corroborated elsewhere), Nick Krall suggested today that the Reds 2026 payroll is going to “be around the same as our payroll from 2025.”
The Reds just made the playoffs for the first time since the sinking of the Lusitania. MLB league minimum salaries are rising some ~2.6% again as part of a multi-year plan set in place a handful of years ago to gradually increase salaries league-wide. The cost of a Qualifying Offer is up another million. Yet still, here we are, with the Reds seemingly a) unwilling to fit that into their tight-ass budget or b) simply telling the world false information.
In today’s day and age it’s nearly impossible to rule out the latter, though everything this ownership group has ever done suggests it’s pretty clearly going to be the former.
If that’s truly the case, the Reds will roll out a payroll on Opening Day of roughly $111 million, though they did finish 2025 with roughly $116 million on the books after deadline additions. As I noted when I looked deeper into their existing payroll obligations and likely arbitration raises a month ago, they already had something akin to $95 million on the books before the Thompson signing. Swapping him in at $1.3 million instead of someone else making league-minimum raises that to just under $96 million, so you can pretty clearly see what they’ve got left to spend within that kind of budget.
That’s with their left fielder about to be a free agent. That’s without a closer, and potentially without a pair of key setup men from last year, too. That’s without Zack Littell, Nick Martinez, or Miguel Andujar, too.
It’s enough to make you wonder just how willing Krall will be to do move someone off the current roster who’s now making more money than they are comfortable paying him. Perhaps that’s Brady Singer or Tyler Stephenson or Gavin Lux, each of whom will be a free agent at the end of next season anyway. Surely he could find some SP depth for less than the $11 million Singer may command (is that Thompson already?), Jose Trevino is already signed, and Gavin Lux just posted a -0.2 bWAR season and still has no position.
All told, it seems to have barely taken a couple weeks after the Reds somewhat promising 2023 campaign ended for the official Wet Blanket of the Cincinnati Reds™ to once again throw a huge chunk of the optimism built up over the last calendar year right out the window.
The guys are just gonna have to play better next year, I guess!
