PHOENIX -- Seth McClung's first big league pitching coach in Tampa Bay was Chris Bosio, and now that they are reunited with Milwaukee, Bosio stopped by earlier this spring with some advice.

"Don't worry about roles," Bosio said he told McClung. "Just be a pitcher."

That advice is coming in handy for McClung, a hard-throwing right-hander who has bounced between the Brewers' starting rotation and the bullpen since the day he arrived from the Rays in July 2007. In the last month alone, McClung has been penciled into the rotation, bounced back to the bullpen and is now looking like an option for the rotation again, depending on Braden Looper's recovery from a rib-cage injury.

McClung made his first spring start in Looper's place on Thursday, allowing two runs and four hits in three innings of a 10-5 Brewers win over Australia's entry in the World Baseball Classic. The outing came a few hours after the Brewers received encouraging news about Looper, who might be able to start the season in the rotation, after all.

The saga reminded Bosio, who is entering his first season as the Brewers' Triple-A pitching coach, of his own coming of age in the late 1980s.

Bosio, a right-hander and Milwaukee's second-round Draft pick in 1982, progressed through the Minor Leagues alongside Dan Plesac, a left-hander and the team's first-round pick in the 1983 First-Year Player Draft. Both were starters, but Bosio remembers getting a call before the 1986 season with news that future Hall of Famer Rollie Fingers was retiring. He and Plesac would report to camp to compete for the closer's role.

Plesac won it, and Bosio was sent to the bullpen at Triple-A Vancouver as insurance. He got a big league callup in August and made two relief appearances before Brewers manager George Bamberger called Bosio into his office and told him he would start the next day against the White Sox.

"I told 'Bambi,' 'I've been relieving the whole year and I'm not stretched out,'" Bosio said. "He goes, 'Listen, you're here to pitch, and that's all you need to do.'"

Bosio took a no-hitter into the fifth inning of that game before he surrendered a home run to Sox rookie first baseman Russ Morman. Afterward, Bamberger and pitching coach Herm Starrette approached Bosio.

"They said, 'Nice job, you're back in the bullpen tomorrow,'" Bosio said.

Now McClung is in a similar position. Bosio, who describes McClung as having, "the heart of a lion," thinks he can handle it.

That's not to say McClung would not prefer a more set situation.

"I'm really looking forward to getting into some sort of rhythm here," said McClung, who had to wait six days between outings instead of the usual four so he could fall into Looper's spot in the spring rotation. "The staff has been good about letting me get some [bullpen sessions], but I'm really looking forward to consistent work. Hopefully we'll figure out what's going on with that.

"The plan for me is to just get ready [as a starter], and if I have to get shifted back into the bullpen, that's just what I have to do. It's my job to be kind of a backup right now.

"I always joke that I would love to have had a little bit of this knowledge six years ago when I started this whole thing," McClung said. "Five years ago, I would have ripped this clubhouse into a thousand pieces. I would have broken my hand on the water cooler after my first outing [against the Cubs last week]. But it's like, 'This is spring. There is time to do better.'"

McClung was Tampa Bay's fifth-round Draft pick in 1999 and pitched four years in the Minor Leagues, topping out at Double-A Orlando, before the Rays gave him a shot in the big leagues two months after his 22nd birthday.

Under Bosio's tutelage in 2003, McClung went 4-1 with a 5.35 ERA in 12 games, five of them starts, before suffering an elbow injury that required Tommy John elbow reconstruction surgery. He was back on the mound in mid-2004, then bounced back and forth between the Minors and the Majors from 2005-2007 and admits that he clashed with Rays coaches and front-office officials. He was traded to the Brewers in July 2007 for reliever Grant Balfour, and both pitchers have flourished since.

"In baseball, you have to learn how to come across," McClung said. "You can want all the right things in the world, but if you look like a jerk doing it, then that's what you are. ... There were a lot of [instances] where I held myself back, and that's where I am, at 28 years old, just now coming to where I need to be."

He describes the trade to Milwaukee as "like a second chance, and I feel like I've done the most with it." McClung finally spent a full big league season with the Brewers in 2008 and went 6-6 with a 4.02 ERA in 37 games, including 12 starts.

That success prompted the Brewers to pencil him in as a starter. But that changed on Feb. 12, when Milwaukee inked Looper to a one-year, $4.75 million contract that bounced McClung to "Plan B" status. Manager Ken Macha met separately with McClung soon after pitchers and catchers reported to camp.

"I told him I thought he finished strong last year ... and I didn't want him to look at us getting Looper and let that affect how he was going to go about his business in Spring Training," Macha said. "I told him there was going to be a need. There was going to be rainouts or doubleheaders and we were going to go through more than five starters."

Macha got his first look at McClung in that role on Thursday, when McClung mixed in eight or nine changeups, but had a hard time with his two-seam, sinking fastball, which was not moving as much as McClung would like. Australian left fielder Justin Huber connected with one of those flat sinkers in the first inning for a two-run home run.

"I've got to loosen up [the grip] a little bit on that sinker and allow it to get in [on right-handed hitters]," McClung said. "I'll go back and make an adjustment and be ready."