Phillies Owner Says Myers' Wife Is A Damned Liar

It was a mistake, as they later admitted, for the Phillies to allow Brett Myers to pitch just two days after he was arrested for punching his wife in the face on a crowded Boston street. But a bigger mistake, we think, might be the team's owner claiming that Myers' wife is a liar. Quoth Bill Giles, one of the Phillies' limited partners (he owns 15 percent of the team):

I don't know that I'm privileged to say [what happened with Myers and his wife]. I'm not the spokesman for the Phillies. I do know what really happened was a lot less than what the public thinks happened and that's the sad part because some bystander saw something that really didn't happen. Brett was trying to help his wife. ... One of our employees [marketing manager Debbie Nocito] saw the whole thing. She said, 'He did not hit her at all, and he didn't grab her hair or anything.' So all the reports were untrue, from what I understand."

This, of course, not only contradicts what Myers' wife claimed, but also what several witnesses told police. In fact, he's the first person to have directly contradicted the police report at all. We're not here to say that team owners probably shouldn't comment about how women who claim their starting pitcher husbands punched them on a crowded city street are lying ... but he probably shouldn't do that.

Q&A With Bill Giles [Philly.com] Bill Giles Must Go [Phillyville] Brett Myers Punched His Wife In The Face [Deadspin]

(UPDATE: The Phillies PR team, finally getting its head out of its proverbial arse, has sent out Phillies president David Montgomery to say Giles was "mistaken.")