Umpire calls Time.

[Manny A]

Originally Posted by MD Longhorn

Actually, this is a good point. If you think about it, the only reason he has to call TIME at this moment is if he saw something else - some other reason to kill the play other than simply a catcher catching the 3rd strike of a 3rd out. So maybe our hypothetical umpire here did NOT fubar the situation - maybe there's just something the hypothetical observer did not see, that the umpire did.

I'm trying to come up with something he might've seen at that particular moment that would've prompted killing play and ruling the batter out.

He signalled the Strike first, so he didn't see a batter contact a pitch while out of the batter's box.

Maybe he discovered after the swing that the batter was using an illegal bat?