I prefer to think I was never strident about this. Or did it capriciously.

Fire the bum!

However often I might have thought about it or written it, years ago, I find I am increasingly loathe to write it now. I believe it is a function of age.

For a sports fan (a sports writer) in his or her 20s or 30s … “fire him” can roll easily off the tongue. Or keyboard. As do “trade him!” or “cut him!” All those snap judgments that might impact a living person and his or her family and friends.

Perhaps it is a function of youth not to think these things through. “He is a professional athlete, getting paid tons of money to do something the rest of us would do for free!” Or, “coaches are hired to be fired, and the man has lost three straight. What are they waiting for?”

I work in a profession where snap judgments about coaches (especially) come easily. Sometimes it is a convenient topic to write about. When in doubt, suggest the coach should be sacked. It is particularly endemic in international soccer, and sometimes I wonder if it is a function of the lack of access, for writers, to athletes in many leagues and countries.

I recall a U.S. colleague, perhaps 10 years my elder, musing, maybe 20 years ago, that he had reached a point where he thought long and hard about calling for someone’s head. “Used to be, I didn’t do that.”

Let’s consider a baseball club trading a player in midseason. A lot of us don’t get past the “good riddance” part of this.

He has to pick up his stuff and be in another city in, oh, 24 hours. He will leave behind his teammates, some of whom he probably considers friends, and the familiarity of the organization that employed him and a city he had come to know … and somehow create a life in a new city and walk into a clubhouse he has never seen and encounter a bunch of guys he doesn’t know.

How jarring must that be? And it happens to nearly every player at least once, and several times for some of them.

Consider your own profession. How jolting would it be if you were told that your company had sent you to another company, on the other side of a country, and that your choice was to report to that new company or have your salary cut off.

We expect athletes to deal with that. To be OK with it. And, really, if you think about it, it is astounding how many athletes manage to seem OK with the move, or even enthusiastic about it. When we civilians would not be.

“I am flattered this club wanted me, and I will do whatever I can to make it a success.”

Really. These guys say that kind of stuff all the time. (They must be instructed in this at an early age; none of us would take a trade we didn’t want as anything other than an insult.)

So, no, I don’t call for coaches to be fired any more, not without some professional or ethical high crimes or misdemeanors. Or I do it very rarely. Neither do I demand a player be waived or traded. Not without thinking it through. Not without careful consideration.

I think this is about age. The older you are, the more clearly you recognize the toll that job upheaval brings.