Zamboanga Declares Itself Winner of Little League Championship

There’s one thing that can be said for the Zamboanga City Little League team: It never gives up.

That Philippine baseball team won the Little League World Series last summer, beating a team from Long Beach for the championship. Then, after a couple of weeks’ of wrangling, lost it when Little League Baseball International ruled that the winning Zamboanga team had used ineligible players.

LLBI is the ultimate authority, so that figured to be the end of it.

But the Zamboanga City Little League has declared LLBI’s decision “a patent nullity” and “void ab initio, “ and awarded itself the title.

In the Zamboanga City Little League’s declaration, dated Sept. 30 and sent to The Times on Monday, the team’s board of directors not only overruled LLBI but declared the parent organization’s ruling illegal and said that members of the International Tournament Committee “should be fired or stripped of their positions.”

Specifically, the declaration said: “ . . . the Zamboanga Little League baseball team hereby declares that it is the 1992 World Series champion, despite the widely publicized illegal decision of the LLBI International Tournament Committee.”