TAMPA — As this highly charged 2020 baseball season launches with the simplicity and poetry that is pitchers and catchers reporting, a few words of counsel to the New York Yankees:

Do not embrace your victimhood.

Digest your pain. Express it if you desire. And then let it go.

On Thursday, George M. Steinbrenner Field will officially become a ballpark once more, opening its gates for the diehards who want to see the pitchers and their catchers participate in their inaugural workout. On Wednesday, though, it felt more like a therapist’s office. Folks here are fired up every which way over Rob Manfred’s finding that the 2017 Astros illegally stole opponents’ signs all the way to a parade, which of course included a seven-game ALCS victory over the Yankees. They’re suspicious, too, about why Jose Altuve wouldn’t allow his teammates to remove his shirt on the field upon eliminating the Yankees from the 2019 ALCS with a walk-off homer against Aroldis Chapman.

All understandable. And all should be wiped away by Feb. 22, when the Yankees kick off their Grapefruit League schedule with a home game against the Blue Jays.

“Obviously, these last several weeks has been a lot, and we’ve had a lot of time to kind of process all this and the range of emotions has been huge: mad, frustrated, disappointed,” Aaron Boone said Wednesday in his first official news conference of spring training. “But you also know there’s a time to move on. … I look at it now as it’s time to move on and move forward.

“We have a great team in that room. And we know the sky’s the limit for that team. We have championship aspirations, and so as we kick things off in earnest tomorrow, the focus is on eliminating distractions and making sure we’re in a position to start laying a foundation to be a champion.”

The Yankees’ third-year manager finds himself assuming an odd role in this story that has gripped the baseball world and beyond: While he didn’t manage the Yankees in that ’17 ALCS, which turned out to be Joe Girardi’s last hurrah, he held close personal relationships with his Astros and Red Sox counterparts — A.J. Hinch and Alex Cora, who served as Hinch’s bench coach in ’17 — and he grew closer with Carlos Beltran last year as Beltran served as a Yankees special adviser. All three have lost their jobs (the Mets hired Beltran as their manager last November) as a result of this scandal.

“I think as human beings we all fall down and fall short and none of us are perfect,” Boone said. “Hopefully I treat people with the grace that would reflect that, but it’s been a little bit of a struggle for me in how I make sense of it.”

The normally taciturn Gary Sanchez, meanwhile, sounded more like Gary Dell’Abate — Baba Booey of “The Howard Stern Show” fame — as he poked fun at Altuve’s refusal to allow his shirt to be taken off by teammates. Through an interpreter, Sanchez said, “I can tell you that if I hit a homer and I get my team to the World Series, they can rip off my pants. Everything. They can rip everything off.”

It’s “important,” Boone agreed, for players to voice their feelings on the matter, and more guys will arrive and let it fly in the coming days. Among those from whom we’re still waiting to hear are Chapman, Aaron Judge and Brett Gardner.

The Yankees, based on what we know, stand as the wronged party here. Yet surely they’d rather be recalled for the right they did rather than the wrong thrust upon them.

“We’ve got too much at stake moving forward to have it just be this distraction that brings any anger or disappointment into our room,” Boone said. “We don’t want that kind of culture. It’s full-throttle forward on 2020.”

Well, a few more shots across the bow won’t kill them. A lot more, however, could find the Yankees looking too much back and not enough forward.