The Cincinnati Reds are projected by ZiPS to finish in 3rd place this season and with a below .500 record. They are well behind both the Chicago Cubs and Milwaukee Brewers in those projections, and it’s been 13 years in a row that the Reds have finished in 3rd, 4th, or 5th place in their own division. The only time during that period in which they were closer than 10 games out of first place when the season ended was in 2020 when the season was just 60 games.
Basically all of that was to say that Cincinnati has had and still likely does have a whole lot of ground to make up against the best teams in their own division. The Reds stated plan is to build through the farm system. ESPN’s Kiley McDaniel released the 2026 Farm System rankings and the club doesn’t exactly stack up well with most of the division.
The Brewers have been the best team in the division over the last decade or so. They’ve won the division four of the last five years, finished in second in the other season, and made the playoffs in seven of the last eight years. ESPN has them as the team with the best farm system in baseball. And they don’t think it’s particularly close, either. Another team from the division – the Pittsburgh Pirates – are ranked 3rd on the list. A third team from the division also ranks in the top 10, with the St. Louis Cardinals coming in at the #9 spot.
To find the Reds you need to go all the way down to the middle of the list as they come in at the 15th spot. Only the Chicago Cubs are lower when it comes to the division, and they are way down at the 25th spot on the list.
To come up with the value of each farm system, McDaniel used the prospect values that were derived from past prospect rankings and how those players with each grade on the scouting scale wound up producing in the future. The research is a little bit outdated now, last updated in 2018 at Fangraphs, but in general it’s still going to give us a good idea of what order teams should be in.
Let’s take a look at how all of the teams stack up based on their value:
I’ve made the teams within the National League Central their team color on the chart so you can see where everyone falls and the value – in millions of dollars – for each organization.
McDaniel’s list for top prospects goes to 200. When looking at the Reds who made that list and comparing it to the top three teams in the division you can see the difference. Cincinnati’s top prospect, Sal Stewart, was 17th overall. The Pirates had the top prospect in all of baseball and a second player ranked ahead of Stewart. The Brewers had the 3rd ranked prospect in baseball. St. Louis had the 7th ranked prospect, and then another guy just two spots behind Stewart. The three teams ahead of them all have a “better” prospect than the Reds did.
Cincinnati had six prospects make the top 200 list. The Brewers had 12. The Pirates had nine. And St. Louis had eight. Those clubs had better top prospects and they also had more depth.
Reds fans may be tempted to point to a guy like Chase Burns, who isn’t eligible for this list after losing prospect status late in 2025 to note that the farm system is missing a big time young player. And that’s true. But the Brewers had Jackson Chourio and Jacob Misiorowski in a very similar boat. Burns isn’t even a full year younger than Paul Skenes is.
The big league club has a lot of catching up to do if they want to win the division. But the farm system seems to be lagging behind much of the division, too. And that’s probably not a good combination given that unlike the Chicago Cubs, who have a very poor farm system, their ownership group doesn’t spend plenty of money to try and make up for at least some of the gaps in their roster.
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