Nolan Jones can still visualize the texts and hear the voicemails.

He can recall the stranger’s voice on the other line who interrupted a conversation with his fiancée on April 1, 2024.

Jones ignored the first call. But when the person dialed again, he told Morgan, who was about five months pregnant, he’d call her right back.

The Guardians’ right fielder can still hear the threats that person and the countless others who called and texted hurled at him that night.

I’m going to kill you.

I’m going to kill your wife.

I’m going to kill your family.

You should kill yourself.

On a brisk afternoon at Wrigley Field that day, Jones, then with the Rockies, allowed a sharp single to scoot under his glove and roll to the ivy-covered wall in left field. He retrieved the baseball and bounced a throw to the cutoff man, resulting in a Little League home run. A 1-0 Colorado deficit became a 4-0 hole. Jones became a prime target for fan vitriol, just five games into a new season.

After the game, a displeased viewer posted Jones’ phone number on social media. For two hours in a lonely Chicago hotel room, as the calls and texts poured in, he cried and wondered how such a promising season had already spiraled out of control.

It was the beginning of the worst year of Jones’ life.

It was the beginning of the best year of his life, too.

The most daunting challenge the big leagues present, Jones says, is believing you belong there in the first place. Entering the 2024 season, Jones had no doubts.

He finished fourth in the National League Rookie of the Year voting in 2023, with a 20-homer, 20-steals season, a league-high 19 outfield assists and more than enough production against left-handed pitching and also away from the thin air at Coors Field to have the Rockies (and himself) confident he was a long-term core piece.

He established lofty goals for himself for 2024: 30 homers, 30 steals, 25 outfield assists, an All-Star nod and a Gold Glove Award.

To his detriment, he chased those figures.

“Every single day that I didn’t succeed in getting closer to those goals felt like a failure,” he says.

Five games, two hits and four errors into the 2024 season, Jones was distraught. That confidence, he found, is fleeting and fragile. Those self-prescribed expectations, he learned, were suffocating and counterproductive.

He misplayed a foul ball in the Rockies’ second game. Two days later, he dropped a lazy fly to left, allowing a run to score. The next afternoon, on the North Side of Chicago, it reached a crescendo.

He remembers thinking: “‘What is going on? How am I here? How did I come into this season on such a high, and five games into it, I’m sitting in my hotel room crying?’

“We make a mistake, we’re on TV — that’s the role I chose and the position I want to be in. But when I was hit with my first failures in the big leagues, it really opened my eyes.”

He scaled back his social media use, tightened his inner circle, and tried to assure himself that in a few weeks or months, no one would remember these missteps.

“People see athletes as superheroes, and (think) we’re not human,” he says. “I’ve asked and worked for this my whole life. I want to be out there every single day. But that thought creeps in the back of your mind: ‘What if I fail again? What if this happens? What if that happens?’ That’s what I had to work on.”

Injuries made matters worse. A lower back strain sidelined him at the end of April. At the time, he owned a .170 batting average and had hit one home run. He couldn’t escape those numbers while on the injured list. Even with a baby on the way, it was all he could think about.

A knee injury sustained during his rehab assignment delayed his return to the majors until mid-June. A month later, his back flared up again.

The morning of Aug. 4, he flew home to Denver from a rehab assignment in Fresno, Calif., just in time for the birth of his first child.

When Jones’ daughter, Kamryn, was born, she was breathing rapidly through her stomach instead of her chest, at 70 breaths per minute instead of 30-60. She had fluid in her lungs and was rushed to the neonatal intensive care unit for treatment.

“I definitely felt helpless,” he says.

They supplied her with oxygen and monitored her for three days. Jones’ .623 OPS, those early-April errors, and his back pain all seemed inconsequential.

Following Kamryn’s discharge from the hospital, the family arrived home at 11:30 p.m. Jones flew to Albuquerque, N.M., at 7 a.m. the next day to continue his rehab assignment.

Four games in Albuquerque. Four more in Round Rock, Texas. Then, the Rockies activated him from the injured list, just in time for another road trip. Three games in Washington, D.C. Three more at Yankee Stadium in the Bronx.

Finally, three weeks after his daughter was born, Jones was back home.

“It was terrible,” he says. “I felt so guilty.”

He fared a bit better at the plate over the final six weeks of the season, but he didn’t supply any power. He finished the year with three homers, five stolen bases and four outfield assists. No All-Star nod. No Gold Glove Award.

“I sucked last year,” he says. “I’ll be the first one to tell you that and there’s no excuse. I get paid to play baseball and I have to show up and do that every single day, no matter what’s going on in my life. But there is an aspect of, most of the guys in here have families, we have pets or children or grandparents, and we go through the same stuff that every other person goes through. I will be the first person to tell you that I didn’t perform last year and I should have been able to, but it’s hard when you have other things going on in your life.”

Kamryn used an oxygen tank for a month. The new parents had to ensure the tubes didn’t wiggle free from her nose at night, so they didn’t sleep much. Mornings often included trips to the hospital for tests. Doctors would decrease her supply of oxygen to see what she could handle. Each trial took about two hours. Then, Jones would head to the ballpark.

When his triumphant 2023 season ended, Jones segued immediately into training for 2024. He didn’t want to lose his confidence or the feel for his swing, so he didn’t take a break. When his body broke down during the 2024 season, he realized that approach had been a mistake.

After the 2024 season mercifully sputtered to the end, Jones focused on fatherhood. The family moved into a new house five days after the season ended. Before their furniture arrived, the couple would sprawl on the floor and stare at their baby. During one of those sessions, Kamryn smiled for the first time. To Jones, nothing else mattered.

Jones spent the first month of the offseason learning how to be a dad and completing physical therapy to restore his back and knees to full strength. He contends he’s healthier physically — and mentally — than he could have imagined possible. Kamryn is healthy, too. She no longer needs supplemental oxygen.

There’s nothing Jones cherishes more than returning home after a game to see the face of someone who has no idea if he went 0-for-4 or 4-for-4.

“It definitely gives you a different appreciation and love that I’ve never felt before,” he says. “I get to go home and hold this little girl who just wants to lick my face and smack me. It changed everything for me.”

The whirlwind calendar year culminated in a trade back to Cleveland, the organization that first drafted him. A slow start hasn’t derailed him, partly because he’s confident he’ll eventually be rewarded for all of the loud contact he has made.

In the ninth inning of Cleveland’s home opener last week, Jones stepped to the plate with the bases loaded and the score tied. A year earlier, he says, he would have doubted himself with every footstep from the on-deck circle to the batter’s box.

“I’ve put in hours and hours on my mental health to get in that headspace where I’m back to believing in myself, knowing I can do this,” he says.

He yanked a 3-1 fastball about four winter beanies to the wrong side of the right-field foul pole. Jones looked to the dugout and locked eyes with his manager. They both couldn’t help but laugh at how close he had come to socking a walk-off grand slam in his return to Cleveland on a frigid afternoon.

Instead, he drew a walk on the next pitch. He tossed his bat, stared at his teammates as they spilled out of the dugout, raised his arms, jogged to first base and exhaled.

It’s been a year.

As taxing and trying as it was, he wouldn’t change it.

“I would never wish upon anyone what I went through last year, both physically and mentally,” he says. “But I think it put me in a better spot. … I had a tough year, but got the biggest blessing I could ever ask for.”