Jones spent most of his years growing up in the hard-edged Bonames neighborhood on the outskirts of Frankfurt with his mother, Barbara, and two younger siblings crammed into a small apartment. They had returned to Germany when Jones was 6, from Tacoma, Wash., where Jones’s father, Halbert, had been stationed for four years in the Army.

It was the last he saw of his father for 20 years. It was not until then that Jones learned his father’s departure was not voluntary: He had been arrested as part of a drug-trafficking ring. He served seven and a half years before being released. Jones’s parents had agreed not to tell their children what had happened.

“He’s determined to be the father to his kids that I wasn’t,” said Halbert Jones, 57, a truck driver in Menifee, Calif., about 75 miles southeast of Los Angeles. “I’m sure many nights that he laid up in bed crying, wondering if I was ever going to be around. If it was my dad, I’d want to know why he wasn’t in my life.”

Image Jones and his children this year from a photograph in his Instagram account. Credit... Jermaine Jones

Sarah contacted Halbert and arranged for him to call Jermaine on his 26th birthday, which led to an emotional and tearful reunion in Miami.

“After that, I told him: ‘Dad, I’m really happy to have you back. Now, we look forward,’ ” Jones said. “He made a mistake, lost his family, had to go for a long time to jail. Still, I think you have to give him a chance that he learned from that mistake, and now he’s a different man.”

This meaning of family explains why Jones’s most difficult transition to the United States has been being away from his wife and children. They live in Los Angeles, in the home Jones bought four years ago in the hillside neighborhood of Encino and had used only as a vacation home until last summer. Several hours after the team landed Thursday, he took teammates to his house, where his wife prepared osso buco and tiramisu for dinner.