Early this afternoon the Cincinnati Reds announced the signing of their first free agent of the offseason, picking up Keegan Thompson on a 1-year, $1,300,000 deal. The reliever who pitched in Triple-A for all of 2025 with the Iowa Cubs is looking to be depth in Cincinnati’s bullpen. Shortly after that deal was announced it seems that Reds president of baseball operations Nick Krall had a meeting with the local media because they all shared his statement that the 2026 payroll will be about the same as it was in 2025. C. Trent Rosecrans of The Athletic seems to have been ahead of the others on reporting that by a matter of seconds.
Teams make most of their money from two things: Television contracts and ticket sales. The television contracts part of it goes beyond just the local deal as everyone gets a slice of the national contracts (both from “tv” and from the MLB package).
The Cincinnati Reds television ratings were up in a big way in 2025. We know this because the Reds and FanDuel Sports Network Ohio put out a press release about it. Nielsen reported that viewership was up 21% on FanDuel Sports Network in 2025 versus 2024. Much of that came from streaming thanks to fans being able to purchase FanDuel Sports Network as a standalone channel rather than have to get it through a cable/satellite provider. Still, even on your “traditional” cable/satellite packages viewership was up 6%.
All of that should, in theory, mean more money for the Reds. But in reality, it may not. That deal with FanDuel Sports Network was only for one year. As of today the club has not announced their plans for how to broadcast games in 2026 to the fans. At this point in the year in 2024 the team also had not announced their plan for 2025, but it would soon be released that they would use MLB.com to stream their games online for fans, as well as have a “Reds” channel for games on the local cable/satellite company packages. A few months later that plan changed as they agreed to the deal with FanDuel.
All of that to say that while Cincinnati probably has a general idea of what their options are and what that likely means in terms of finances, it’s not certain. And that uncertainty probably keeps them from pushing more money into the middle of the table.
As far as ticket sales go – that was also up in 2025 versus 2024. The 2025 season saw attendance jump to 2,170,963. That was an increase of 146,785 fans through the gates. The average ticket price to a Reds game in 2025 was roughly $25.50. Multiply those two together and it’s an additional $3.7M. That ticket price, though, is almost assuredly not the only money the team makes from those fans. The Reds probably get some parking revenue, merchandise, and food revenue, too. How much is an unknown answer but it’s also fair to say it’s probably not close to matching the ticket sale portion.
What all of that tells us is that between an unknown television contract and a small, but not nothing increase in ticket sales – the revenue increase probably wasn’t all that much in what we do know and the unknown leaves a lot up in the air.
What it also tells us is that the idea of Cincinnati going out and signing a free agent of note is probably a fever dream. While there are some contracts coming off of the books, a handful of guys are getting raises in arbitration that eat up plenty of that. And if payroll is not going to go up, there’s just not going to be the money there to do much in free agency and if the Reds are going to acquire a difference maker it’s going to have to be in a trade for a player still getting paid their pre-free agency deal.
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