League Baseball. A team from Staten Island hired a private investigator to look into the ages of the entire team. A similar investigation was conducted by a team from Pequannock Township, New Jersey. Neither turned up any evidence that the players were too old. Rolando Paulino, the league president, adamantly insisted that Almonte had in fact been born on April 7, 1989. Paulino was initially backed by Little League and Dominican officials, who said the Baby Bombers had followed all proper procedures regarding age verification. Officials at Little League headquarters even took the unusual step of checking each of the player documents due to the rumors surrounding the team. Little League officials had increased scrutiny of player eligibility after the 1992 Series, in which the champions from Zamboanga City in the Philippines were stripped of their title due to a large number of out-of-district and overage players. Reporters from Sports Illustrated went to the civil records building in Moca two weeks after the end of the 2001 Series. They discovered a notation in the birth ledger showing that in 1994, Felipe Almonte had registered his son's birth date as April 7, 1987 at Dr. Toribio Bencosme Hospital—which would have made him 14 years old at the time of the 2001 Series. It was common for Dominican parents to wait years before registering the birth of a child. Their report, posted on the magazine's website just before being published, triggered a full investigation by Little League, even as Almonte and his teammates were being feted in the Bronx. Almonte's mother, Sonia Rojas Breton, owned a handwritten birth certificate saying that he had been born at home in Jamao with the help of a midwife in 1989. She had registered Danny's 1989 birth date in 2000. Both of Almonte's parents, though separated, insisted their son was born in 1989, condemning the other documents as false. Felipe Almonte appeared on Good Morning America at the time of the investigation, proclaiming his son's innocence. Almonte's real age As part of Dominican officials' investigation, Victor Romero, head of the national public records office, interviewed the witnesses whose signatures appeared on the 1989 birth certificate. They both denied knowing Danny's parents, let alone signing the certificate. On August 31, Romero announced that Danny had in fact been born in 1987. As a result, Danny Almonte was retroactively declared ineligible, and the Baby Bombers had to forfeit