The Red Sox and Yankees are playing this weekend. Elsewhere, Dodgers outfielder (and former Sea Dogs infielder) Mookie Betts is making Mookie-type plays; Indians right-hander Shane Bieber is striking out every other batter he faces; and rising star Mike Yastrzemski is batting .414 for San Francisco.

So much to take in for the baseball fan.

But, of course, there are other imposing headlines for baseball, using words like “coronavirus,” “outbreak” and “possible shutdown.”

Will Major League Baseball make it to the end of the season?

Seventeen games, including three on Saturday, have been postponed because of positive COVID-19 test results. There is fear of an outbreak among the St. Louis Cardinals, with three players and three staff members testing positive over the last three days, resulting in the postponement of the first two games of a weekend series at Milwaukee.

Only one team has reached outbreak status, with 21 members of the Miami Marlins – 18 of them players – testing positive.

Those numbers had MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred threatening to shut down the season unless his sport did a better job of managing the pandemic.

There are voices calling for Manfred to pull the plug now, saying the risk is too great.

Whatever your opinion, it will be contested. Calling off the season now seems premature. But if you want the games to continue, accusations will fly that you’re making a game more important than a life-and-death issue.

For now, I want the games to continue.

There is little proof that any players contracted the virus during games, although there have been visible violations of MLB’s in-game protocols (players exchanging high-fives, spitting and sitting too close together).

The real culprit appears to be the players’ actions on their own time.

The Marlins went to Atlanta for two preseason games just before the regular season began, but reportedly did more than play baseball – going out on the town, mingling in the hotel bar.

So much for social distancing.

“I’m hopeful that it scares them a little bit,” Red Sox Manager Ron Roenicke said of the reaction to the Marlins’ outbreak.

“I know we’ve been good at this (following protocols), but we can be better.

“I think anything that happens like this is definitely a reminder to the guys … follow the protocols, to not go out.

“I know when you’re young, it’s difficult to be locked in your hotel room and doing nothing, but also they (must) realize we’ve got 60 games and we need to try to do everything we can to stay healthy.”

To that end, MLB appears ready to mandate that teams hire a “protocol monitor” to ensure players, coaches and other team personnel are compliant. Fans of the movie “A League of Their Own” will remember Miss Cuthbert, the chaperone assigned to the team, making sure the ladies behaved.

Now the guys need a Miss Cuthbert to keep them from harming themselves and the game.

Such a monitor should have been in place from the start, but remember how long it took MLB and the players’ union to agree on financial terms? For all their talk about safety, the key to resuming the games was money. It’s apparent that the safety protocols had holes, especially when it came to enforcement.

But now that the season is in jeopardy, maybe MLB and the players will take health matters more seriously.

The monitors are a start. If a player continuously and directly refuses to follow protocols, he needs to be removed from the roster. Think that’s draconian? There are calls for the Marlins to be removed from the 2020 schedule (much like Major League Soccer expelled teams that experienced outbreaks from its “MLS is Back Tournament”).

Games will have to be made up, and moving to seven-inning games for doubleheaders is a good idea (but only for the 2020 season, please).

The 30-man rosters are supposed to be reduced to 28, then 26. Don’t do it. Shrinking rosters saves money, but this packed schedule with little preseason preparation is putting a stress on teams – more so with games to be made up. Stop being cheap and be smart.

There are bound to be more positive tests, but with enforced protocols, nothing should reach the Marlins level; nothing should be close to that.

Keep playing baseball. Yes, this season is an anomaly already (or as Michael Chavis put it during a Zoom call on Friday, “it’s 2020, everything is weird”), but MLB, with all its owner-labor dysfunction, still has much to offer.

Play the games, while demonstrating how, with proper protocols, life is becoming a little closer to normal.

“People are searching for some kind of normalcy,” Red Sox Chief Baseball Officer Chaim Bloom said Saturday afternoon. “We have a chance to be an example of how to do this … Find a way to function … We can be a positive example how to carry on with this.”

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