The Hawaii baseball team opened its most difficult road trip of the season with a three-hitter of Santa Clara in a nonconference mid-week contest at the Broncos’ Schott Stadium on Tuesday night.

UH (23-8) bounced back from a home series loss to Long Beach State by effectively handing off the baton between seven pitchers in a 5-3 victory.

Max Jones (1-0) worked the sixth and seventh innings with three strikeouts without allowing a baserunner to pick up the win against the West Coast Conference team, while Ethan Thomas worked the last two innings for his second save of the season.

Thomas struck out his fourth batter to punctuate it.

The Rainbow Warriors now head down the Central California coast to San Luis Obispo, Calif., for a three-game Big West series against conference-leading Cal Poly (23-8, 12-0), which rallied to sweep UC San Diego last weekend and topped San Jose State 8-5 on Tuesday.

UH's bats arrived from Honolulu just in time for first pitch. Left fielder Kamana Nahaku continued his hot stretch at the plate with two RBIs while the first three hitters in the UH order — Shunsuke Sakaino, Matthew Miura and Ben Zeigler-Namoa — had two-hit games.

Santa Clara (13-16) did all of its damage on a three-run homer by Dylan Joyce in the third inning to take a 3-2 lead.

UH responded with an RBI groundout by Nahaku in the fifth, a run-scoring Jared Quandt sacrifice fly in the seventh and Miura's RBI double down the left-field line in the eighth.

Brian McInnis covers the state’s sports scene for Spectrum News Hawaii. He can be reached at brian.mcinnis@charter.com.