DETROIT — There were two outs in the ninth inning. Everything was hanging in the balance. Jahmai Jones stood on first base and watched the replay on the big board. He thought he was safe. Felt pretty sure, even. But in this game, you just never know what is going to happen next.Jones has been criticized and maligned. At the plate, he has slumped and he has searched. He entered his ninth-inning at-bat with only one hit in his past 22 tries. There is a .146 batting average next to his name. As the face of the Tigers’ pinch-hit woes, fans booed every time his name was announced Saturday and Sunday.“I think that’s the first time in my career I’ve been booed by an entire stadium,” Jones said.As he stood on first base after a bang-bang play on a groundball to shortstop, Jones waited with the weight of the world.What was going through his mind?“What wasn’t, man? Everything,” Jones said after the Tigers’ extra-innings win over the Chicago White Sox. “’Please, Lord, let this be a hit.’ It’s Father’s Day, man.”Jones had hit a groundball to White Sox shortstop Luisangel Acuña. Perhaps feeling like he was running for his job, Jones booked it down the line with a 29.7 foot-per-second sprint speed, an increase of 1.3 feet per second over his average.At first base, the boos, the stakes and the call were only part of the calculus. Jones was 13 years old when his father, former Detroit Lions player Andre Jones, died of a brain aneurysm. He was 42. Jones was one of six children, left in a wave of grief. He once said he still thinks of his father every day. He’s honored him with stitching on his glove and a pendant around his neck.It’s all a little more complicated now. Sunday was Jones’ first Father’s Day as a dad himself. He and his wife welcomed a baby girl this offseason. He did his postgame interview wearing a camouflage Dad Gang hat.But Sunday, Jones also thought about Andre and all that he’s missed. “It’s always a little bittersweet playing on Father’s Day,” Jones said. “A little even more bittersweet this go-around being a father. There’s just a lot that when you were younger, you would think about him being around for and being a part of it.”Adding to all that: Jones’ wife, Alexandra, is from Sweden, and almost a year ago, they planned for her to go home for a family wedding and Swedish holiday. Knowing this fell on Father’s Day, and with a baby girl in tow, Alexandra thought about canceling the trip. “Baby,” Jones told her, “you can’t cancel that trip. It’s too important.”Sunday morning, Jones asked Tigers outfielder Kerry Carpenter to grab him a pamphlet from the team’s chapel service. Jones couldn’t make it because he was FaceTiming with his wife and baby daughter. They’ve been gone for a couple of weeks now. They’ll be reunited in early July when the Tigers play in Texas. Jones knows his daughter is growing, developing, changing by the day. When his wife and daughter return, “I’ll get a whole new baby,” Jones said. Sunday, then, had already been exhausting in the best and worst of ways. “Your emotions are a little all over the place to begin with,” Jones said. “Then you get booed on Father’s Day. I was like, ‘You got to be kidding me.’”Whatever he was feeling inside, Jones never let it show on his face. Never let it detract from the way he aims to play the game. “You can’t really wear your emotions on your sleeve in a sport like this,” he said. “You just try to swallow your emotions”That pamphlet from the chapel service read at the top: “Gen. 28 — Jacob’s Turning Point.”Over the past few weeks, Jones has tried to work himself out of a deep slump. There have been times where he has hit a ball hard, only to watch it land in a fielder’s glove. There have been other moments where he has looked lost at the plate. Saturday, he pinch-hit for Carpenter in the fourth inning. He fouled a ball hard off his chin, then struck out swinging. Cue the boos.“Obviously it’s a bad feeling,” Jones said. “You never want to get booed by your home fans. But obviously I can’t get wrapped up in that. If I got wrapped up in it, I would have not been able to do what I did in my last at-bat. I would have been worrying about if the fans are going to boo me again. Hopefully I start turning it around so they can forgive me. … I know the entire city wants us to win, they want us to be good, they know how good we can be as a team. Obviously we want to do that, too. I feel for them. I really do. But nobody takes it harder than we do.”The Tigers, perhaps to their own detriment, have stuck with Jones, who crushed left-handed pitching at a .970 OPS clip last season. Manager A.J. Hinch, who was 18 when his own father died, continues to insert Jones in big situations, even though the Tigers rank 29th in production from pinch-hitters, and even though Jones’ struggles have only seemed to get worse. The manager and the player have even sat down and talked about it, as noise from the outside builds by the day. The truth is more of those boos were directed at Hinch and the Tigers’ brass than Jones himself. “He’s been through it,” Hinch said. “He’s going through it. He feels it. He knows it. He hears it. And obviously doesn’t have any quit in him.”Jones first entered Sunday’s game in the seventh inning. Hinch inserted three straight right-handed pinch-hitters against White Sox lefty Bryan Hudson, even though left-handers have hit him for an .810 OPS this season. Jones struck out in the seventh. When the lineup rolled back around against right-hander Seranthony Dominguez in the ninth, it felt like another questionable decision. Then came Jones’ ground ball, and, finally, the result of the call. The review showed Jones was safe at first. Kevin McGonigle followed with a base hit. Dillon Dingler came through with another knock to drive in Jones and tie the game.The Tigers eventually won it on a 10th-inning blooper from Matt Vierling. It was their first extra-innings win in six tries this season. A team that has taken its licks all year got a needed course correction and completed a sweep of the White Sox, keeping their season alive a little bit longer. “We talk about ‘everything matters,’” Hinch said. “At his lowest — this is probably the lowest for him in how he’s contributed, especially for this organization and this team and these fans — it’s nice to see him do something to help us win.”One infield hit doesn’t erase weeks of struggles. One nice series doesn’t absolve a team of all its flaws. But maybe there’s a lesson in what Jones did and how the Tigers won. Sometimes, when things are hard and the world seems stacked against you, the best you can do is keep showing up. Keep your head down. Keep running. “I want to do my job because it just helps everyone else around me and helps the team,” Jones said. “To do that, I want to keep getting those opportunities, keep getting those moments. The only way I’m going to get through it is to push through.”