No-hitter gives Bosio ‘credibility’

SARASOTA, Fla. — For the second straight year, the Chattanooga Lookouts have a pitching coach with a crowning achievement.

Unlike last year, however, Chris Bosio has a memorable moment his players might recall. The new Lookouts pitching coach was with the Seattle Mariners in April 1993 when he no-hit the Boston Red Sox.

“I think that gives him a little more credibility right off the bat,” Lookouts starting pitcher James Avery said. “It’s not just some guy who read a book. It’s a guy who has been there and lived through the experience, and obviously he’s got something to give.”

Chattanooga’s pitching coach last year, Grant Jackson, was the Game 7 winner for the Pittsburgh Pirates in the 1979 World Series, but that claim to fame occurred before most of his Chattanooga pitchers were born.

Though Bosio can’t match Jackson’s 19 years in the majors, he did pitch 11 seasons with Milwaukee and Seattle, compiling a 94-93 record with a 3.09 career earned run average. The 44-year-old has 309 big-league games to draw from and those magical nine innings against Boston, but that won’t be his approach in molding the Lookouts.

“I try not to use the old cliché of ‘When I played,’ because the players know,” Bosio said. “I don’t need to preach that every day. I just want to help each and every guy I can based on their own abilities. One thing I learned a long time ago is that you can’t be a cookie-cutter pitching coach.

“We’ve got a lot of guys out here with different personalities and different sizes, and it’s my job to make each and every one of them better.”

Bosio’s coaching career has been different from most because of circumstances out of his control.

After working for three years as a special assignment pitching coach with Seattle, where he often dealt with new Lookouts manager Mike Goff, Bosio was named Lou Piniella’s pitching coach at Tampa Bay in 2003. He was at the big-league level, but a slew of setbacks resulted in him working with the Devil Rays for just one season.

Bosio said that in a six-week period in ’03, his wife, his wife’s parents and his own parents were each diagnosed with some form of cancer.

“At that time, I could see it was all wearing on my wife and my kids,” he said. “I sat down with her and told her that obviously she was going through a lot and that I was still young and would have opportunities in front of me the rest of my life. There was no doubt we had to take care of business on the home front.”

The family had been living in California but moved back to her home state of Wisconsin.

Since 2003, Bosio’s wife has been treated for a skin melanoma, his father has had a kidney removed and his mother continues to battle Hodgkin’s disease. His mother-in-law has been through two breast cancer surgeries, and his father-in-law has battled lung and prostate cancer and had half a lung removed last week.

“Everybody knows someone or has people in their lives who have been through similar things,” Bosio said. “We had to battle through it, but everybody is healthy now and battling through it with the help of a lot of prayers.”

The Chicago Cubs offered Bosio the chance to get back into pro baseball last year, but he didn’t feel the time was quite right. When he received calls from Goff and Reds player development director Terry Reynolds last fall, he felt differently.

Now he’s back in uniform and working for a friend.

“Mike is very competitive, and our personalities are very similar as far as that goes,” Bosio said. “We like to have fun at the ball park, but at the same time we like to win. That’s one thing we’re going to do in Chattanooga. We’re going to win.”