Three mini-columns for the price of one:

•CURT SCHILLING

He’s like the little kid who thinks he’s the smartest in the class, the one who has an opinion on everything, just ask him. Better yet, you don’t even have to ask him; he’ll tell you, whether you want to hear it or not.

One day he’s saying that the Sox don’t need Roger Clemens, the next he’s saying that Barry Bonds admitted cheating on his wife, cheating on his taxes and cheating on the game.

And the next day?

He apologizes for what he says about Bonds.

In an age of athletes who cling to their clichés as closely as they cling to the perks in their contracts, this can be refreshing. No one ever said Big Schill is dull. Or bad copy. And like anyone who throws opinions around as if they were batting-practice fastballs, rest assured some are going to get him in trouble, especially in baseball clubhouses, where too many large egos are in too small a place for too much time. One suspects his act is wearing a little thin inside the Red Sox’ clubhouse.

Consider manager Terry Francona’s statement the other day, the one that said Schilling essentially should knock off the baseball state-of-the-union addresses, which for Francona is the equivalent of a public flogging.

Ultimately, though, it doesn’t matter what Schilling says, or what he writes on his blog, or any of it. What matters is how he pitches, and that is how it should be. He always will have his slice of immortality around here for 2004, and that is how it should be, too. All the rest? Schilling being the star in his individual movie? Schilling in his self-appointed role as the game’s omsbudsman?

All the rest is theater.

Dare we say, Curt being Curt?

•DAVID ORTIZ

Big Papi is the latest high-profile athlete to find himself inside the media mixmaster.

Even if it sounds like much ado about nothing.

This comes on the heels of his statement that he unknowingly might have taken steroids in the protein shakes he used to drink as a kid in the Dominican Republic, the point being that who knew back then? By all accounts it was said as almost a throwaway line while defending Barry Bonds.

But there are no throwaway lines anymore. Not with the Internet. Not with what seems to be a thousand and one media outlets, all trying to get a scoop, all trying to outdo each another, all trying to be first, all trying to make something out of not much. The Ortiz story is just the latest example.

This is news?

This deserves to be a big story, splashed all over the back page of the Boston Herald, complete with a headline that said, “Sympathy For The Devil”?

You tell me.

Ortiz also is a victim of this gray area in baseball history, this time when who did steroids and who didn’t is the game’s dirty secret, the price baseball now pays for too many years of looking the other way when baseballs flew out of parks in record numbers, and too many bodies changed too dramatically in too short a time. The price Ortiz paid for his supposed throwaway line.

This is what happens when it’s all too much unexplored territory, too many unanswered questions.

This is what happens when the steroid issue still hovers over the game, the thundercloud in the summer afternoon threatening everything, the one that never seems to go away.

•SENIOR YEAR

Dan Shaughnessy, the talented columnist for the Boston Globe, is probably best known outside of his circulation area for The Curse of the Bambino, the book that not only captured the Red Sox’ tortured history, but also coined the phrase that became synonymous with it. He’s also written eight other books.

But Senior Year is his best.

It’s the account of Shaughnessy’s son’s journey through his senior year at Newton North High School, in a town of more than 80,000 people, “most of whom at one time or another seem to have written books, seen therapists, or driven Volvos.” To say the book is wonderful is an understatement, part memoir, part autobiography, part father-son saga, all told within the emotional context of watching a son come of age before your eyes.

Sam Shaughnessy was a high school baseball star, a kid with baseball dreams that extended behind the small fields of suburban Boston baseball fields, and that’s the spine of the book. Where will he decide to go to college? How good will his last season of high school baseball be? What is it like to be in an ultra-competitive high school where success and getting into a prestigious college almost seem like some communal birthright?

Watching all this is Dan Shaughnessy, who grew up in a less-affluent town in a less-affluent era, back when kids didn’t go to showcase summer camps and grow up with international babysitters, a man who knows that he and his wife are raising their children very differently than the way he and his siblings were raised. A man who comes to know that parents never know what’s going on in their kids’ lives, no matter how hard they try.

And through all this, like a stream of light that illuminated everything it touches, is baseball. This game that both father and son love. This game that unites them in unspoken ways. This game that transcends the generations and touches everyone’s heart.

Like Senior Year does.

breynold@projo.com