From those photos, it looks too close to call.
The batter swings and misses for strike three, seemingly ending the inning, and immediately turns and starts walking toward his dugout... The catcher stands and heads toward his own dugout and at the same time does the routine roll of the ball back to the mound. The batter suddenly changes his mind, spins around, and takes off toward first. That leaves plenty of time for SOMEBODY on the Angels to react, but nobody did. The batter makes it to first base unchallenged and is as amazed as everybody else in the stadium, not to mention the millions of television viewers, to find that he is SAFE!
The whole thing was a mess, and I have no idea how the umpire, standing BEHIND the catcher, could have determined that the ball glanced off the dirt. No way.
Sound. Umpires are trained to understand the differences between a ball hitting a glove, the dirt, a shoe on a base vs a ball in a glove. At the level these umps are at they're really good, and rarely wrong.
If your account is correct, then the batter should be out for running outside the baseline, right? I thought this stuff wasn't supposed to happen after the 1908 Giants-Cubs fiasco, but who knows...
It was too close to call with the naked eye, but he determined it by watching Pierzynski run to 1st. At that point he had to either go with the veteran catcher batting or the third string catcher who had exercised gross negligence by presuming the oucome of a critical close call. At that point it was no longer a close call.