DETROIT – For everybody who gets to celebrate a dad or being a dad on Father’s Day, there’s somebody missing their dad a little more. For Jahmai Jones, Sunday was a little bit of both. It was his first Father’s Day as a dad, but his umpteenth without his own father, former Detroit Lions linebacker Andre Jones, who passed away suddenly from an aneurysm in 2011 when Jahmai was just 13 years old. “It’s hard to not get emotional on Father’s Day,” said Jones, whose wife and baby daughter were out of town but watched the Tigers’ 5-4 comeback win over the White Sox from afar. “Being a first-time father, it’s a lot to take in. So your emotions are all over the place to begin with.” Now add the emotion of getting booed by a sellout crowd in the same city where his dad and brother played football, and across the street from where his older brother T.J. played wide receiver for the Lions a decade ago. It’s obviously not personal. Part of it is Jones as the face of manager A.J. Hinch’s pinch-hit strategy, a key philosophy of Detroit’s success the last two years but a struggle this year. Jones, who posted a .970 OPS against lefties and a .782 OPS as a pinch-hitter last year, is 12-for-72 (.167) with 23 strikeouts against lefties this season and 5-for-28 with 12 strikeouts as a pinch-hitter. “He’s been through it. He’s going through it,” Hinch said. “And he feels it. He knows it. He hears it.” That doesn’t make it any easier.
