money is your ceiling. how well you use it is how good of a team you have. the true value of young and old mix is the mix of their contracts. for every club control or club-friendly player, you can sign more elsewhere.
if you have no money and need to build up prospects, i'd focus on timing of when you switch from loading up minors to cashing in on said prospects. when you have enough to build a core -- either trading them or keeping them -- then, you go ahead and pull the trigger on the switch in strategies. at that point a fw FA signings to fill in holes... or even if a 'too good to pass' FA in the 1-2 years leading up to this switch, but young enough to be worth it etc etc.. multiple forces at play... use common sense for timing. it's usually just a matter of using addition.
if you have some money, and i think the reds aren't that poor, you can start buying FA now... no bad contracts, though.... intend to use these guys for 2-3 years and trade before the end of their contract -- increasing MiL depth, hopefully in positions that will be aging on mlb roster in 3-5 years.
when you get to a point where all your decisions are about 3-5 years from now, you'll be a perennial winner. i bet the reds can get upto 180-200M payroll. once your fan interest catches up to all the forthcoming success, you can make plenty of revenue.
always push ticket price to achieve attendance goal -- as high as possible on price. if you have to draw it back teh next game due to a dip in attendance, that's a learning experience. figure out how you can increase it throughout season. at least an extra 20-40M/yr and likely worth the effort to learn for any team. (20-40M in winning years, not dumpy ones, also seems to go higher after a few consecutive years of success.)
anyway, with a 200M budget, you can have ~7-10 hof/asg quality guys depending on # and type of cheap contracts and # of younger players. not saying that's your cap of high end players... just the ones with 15-25M/year contracts.
if a player gets 40-100ab a year, don't invest much in that. it's an incredibly small slice of the pie. don't sweat the small stuff like that... the choices are mostly ubiquitious after a certain point. don't split hairs beyond the atom
