Ask Mr. Google…
UPDATE: WE HAVE NEW EYEWITNESS INFO AVAILABLE. IF YOU’D LIKE, GO AHEAD AND SKIM THROUGH THIS PAGE FOR BACKGROUND INFO, BUT THE NEW INFO IS ON THE NEXT PAGE.
Google Street View is helpful here. Along that stretch of Crawford Street, there is exactly one awning that could possibly be involved: it covers the entrance to the apartment building Ramos was in at 500 Crawford Street.
It’s the other end of the ball’s flight that actually has more uncertainty about it. There are precious few photos available that clearly indicate where home plate is located within Minute Maid Park… photos with the roof opened, that is.
In fact, one of the photos available pre-dates the construction of the apartment building that we need as the ball’s landing spot.
Both Google Maps and Google Earth currently show the stadium with the roof closed, so it’s actually imperative to have an aerial view that shows where home plate resides.
There is one such pic showing the view toward left field that helps establish the location of the left field foul line.
For the right-field foul line, this view and the equally-ancient pic noted earlier are about as good as we can get. Not definitive, but pretty close for our purposes as we can extrapolate the lines to architectural features of the stadium walls.
Thus we can at least make a decent approximation of the distance from that awning back to home plate… with one slight caveat.
As it happens, there is not a direct line to the awning in question without going through the Union Station building… and video replays show clearly (start at roughly the 3:37 mark) that the ball did not have the height to clear that 5-to-6 story structure.
So either (a) the ball bounced around a bit before caroming over to the awning, or (b) there was another, newer awning installed that we don’t yet have a Google Street View picture of — though frankly, it’s not at all obvious where another awning could be installed. Let’s go with “(a)”.
I’ve got a theory about how the ball got there, too… just stand by for a minute, for it’s time for the numbers.