Good Stuff, Spec. You're probably right on all three counts. I have no problem with the handling of Ackley, but do think he played his Almonte and Ramirez cards badly. In the end, he got the Almonte one right, probably a week (give or take a week) too late, is all. Ramirez/ I still don't know if he's getting that one right.

He's a fiery guy, but he also seems to needle some players and issue large swaths of blanket support to others.  He has "his guys" and then "other guys."  Bill Parcells was like that in football.  He would come in, tell the team that half of them wouldn't be there next year, bring in a bunch of his old players from previous stops to show the new guys how to do it His Way, and blow out anybody who couldn't take his needling and abuse.
He was a Super Bowl winning coach, so you took that as a player.  And veterans told the rookies how to deal with it.  But if you couldn't thrive in that kind of environment, it would not go well for you. Lloyd hasn't won anything as a manager to demand respect (he's no La Russa) and baseball locker rooms are not like football ones.  You can't yell after every game - there's a few more of em.
The guys Lloyd seems to like? Guys like himself, naturally.  Who hasn't gotten a great shake in the early going? The soft-faced, soft-spoken pitcher. The quiet Canadian. Players who won't pop off and get in your face.
Problem is, we don't really have a popping-off kind of team. Maybe that's what Lloyd wants, a few guys who chew tacks and spit fire. But we're still one of the youngest teams in the league, and we've been bad at player development (which is different than player talent).
Talented guys struggle here.  We have poor advance scouting, bad doctors (anybody see how Mike Morse is doing in SF now that his wrist isn't broken?) and an inability to get our hitters to grow as players.
Maybe that'll stop now.  Maybe Saunders can take the doubters and show them up.  Maybe Ackley will hit, and Miller and Romero and Zunino will remember the rule about 4 balls equalling a trip to first base. We're where we had to be at this time, around .500.  Our offense is not good, but it has the batters to get better...
I just hope Lloyd's approach helps us get better.  If the kids tune him out, some people are getting fired.  This isn't football - you can't scrap half the roster in a season just because their emotional makeup doesn't match what you want and still make the playoffs.  
That said, being .500 into May with a raft full of pitching reinforcements on the way is a good thing. We have room for improvement and have recovered from that horrific losing streak to keep the season afloat. I hope Lloyd can find out how to get the most out of the talented kids we have and we can make it a fun season to watch and hopefully a competitive one down the stretch, which will be rare air for us.  Because if he can't, he and Zduriencik will be on the street sooner rather than later.  And La Russa's still looking for a job...
~G

the seeming disfunction at the managerial level, the lack of ANYbody getting off to a truly hot start to the season, the collapse of Brad Miller so far, the fiasco in center field, the slow start by Cano with respect to big hits, the big time SP injuries, the bullpen problems, all this STUFF that has left me feeling this club is the same old same old, and yet the team is at .500. I dunno if this really means anything with the season just a little over a month old, but this 8 out of 10 streak has salvaged some hope. Heads up, guys.
This is DaddyO speakin' here. I have always insisted that we gotta look at the fundamental EVIDENCE first, and I've based my critique of the Zduriencik regime primarily on the cold hard fact of their record. Now I gotta admit that though this team definitely looks discombobulated in so many ways, it's record suggests that if they can play .500 ball with all this centrifugal stuff going on, what can they do if centripetal stuff starts to happen and things coalesce? What happens, for example, if Brad Miller starts to work out of his funk like Seager did? Saunders finally seizes his opportunity and doesn't ruin things by running into a wall? Cano starts to hit for more power and get more big hits? All this is precisely the kind of hope I've pooh-poohed for two years now, and I'm still skeptical. But it wouldn't take much for this club if it's already playing .500 ball without those things.