I just returned from the St. Petersburg Main Library empty handed. I didn’t have the identification to get a library card. They require, in lieu of a properly addressed drivers’ license, a utility bill or lease, and silly me just took a paycheck and two other bills addressed to me.

Anyhow, something I saw there bothered me, and I wanted to vent. Thumbing through the newspapers, I found a copy of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution from this week. The centerpiece focused on the Little League World series.

(I would link to the article, but that’s a seperate rant. “Please tell us a little about yourself,” my butt. They could’ve gotten some ads in front of me - and whoever followed the link, but they chose to pry into my privacy and farm for my email address.)

The main photograph was a close-up of the face of a young Columbus, Ga., player. He was crying. It moved me, no doubt. It told the story of Columbus’ loss to a Japanese team. Fine. But was it really necessary? I’m not so sure.

I lay out pages for a living. I see a lot of photos, and this one had a candid power to it. But, as a designer, I might have tried to put myself in the cleats of this young man. How do you think his friends treated him after thousands of copies of him “fighting back tears,” as the caption put it, circulated. Do you think his friends consoled him? I doubt it. More likely, he got clowned. Big time.

Whether it’s right or not, tears equate with weakness for men. That’s just the way it is. I pity this young man, who was publicly humiliated at an age when kids are just learning what being a young man means.

Wait, it gets worse. The AJC, no doubt thinking it clever, put that quote from Tom Hanks’ character in A League of Their Own in prominent type about the photo.

“There’s no crying in baseball.”

I really can’t think of a more insensitive thing the newspaper could have done to this kid. He’s shattered after having lost a series that obviously meant the world to him. In his lowest depths of disappointment, they snap his photograph. Then, they top it with a snarky, taunting quote about crying from a movie about girls playing baseball, and print 300,000 copies for posterity.

How, as an 11- or 12-year-old boy, would you feel?

Men, believe it or not, are sensitive creatures. Their fragile, stoic façade means the world to them, and that should be respected.