­SANTA CLARA, Calif. — Eight was great for the University of San Francisco baseball team Saturday.
 
The Dons got their eighth West Coast Conference win and pushed their win streak to eight games – their longest in eight years – with a 7-6 win over Santa Clara at Stephen Schott Stadium that gave them their third straight West Coast Conference series victory.
 
The Dons (13-15, 8-3 WCC) jumped ahead 5-0 early thanks in part to a three-run homer from Jordan Vujovich in the third and a solo shot from Nick Yovetich in the fourth. It was USF's 10th multi-homer game of the season. They would lead by scores of 6-2 and 7-3 later, but Santa Clara's own multi-homer game brought it back within striking distance.
 
Jake MacNichols led off the bottom of the eighth with his WCC-leading ninth home run of the season and Austin Reyes hit a two-run shot two batters later to get the Broncos (11-17, 4-7 WCC) within one. USF's Jesse Barron straightened things out after that, retiring five of the next seven batters he faced, including a swinging strikeout of MacNichols – who represented the winning run in the bottom of the ninth – to end the game.
 
"Little sloppy at the end, the error, the home run, we didn't make good pitches in the eighth," said San Francisco head coach Nino Giarratano. "I thought we had a pretty good day. We were in control of the game 5-0, we were in control of the game 6-2, 7-3. We should've scored in the eighth inning and we didn't. We needed that knock-out punch, and it would've been nice to score 10 or 11 today."
 
San Francisco stranded 11 runners Saturday, including leaving the bases loaded twice. It loaded the bases with no outs in the fifth and only got one run on a bases-loaded hit-by-pitch. Then it loaded the bases in the eighth with leading hitter Jacob Munoz coming to the plate, but a flyout ended the threat with no runs scoring.
 
The Dons used four pitchers, with Max Jones (2-1) earning his second win with his third straight scoreless appearance. He entered in the sixth with two runners in scoring position and only one out, and he got a strikeout and a groundout to escape the jam. Then, after a leadoff walk in the seventh he got three consecutive outs on balls that didn't leave the infield, stranding a runner at third and preserving the Dons' 7-3 lead at the time.
 
"Great outs by Jones," said Giarratano. "I thought Mollerus was good today. He got off it a little in the fourth when he gave up a couple hits, but I thought Max was great. He spun the breaking ball in there, a little better command of the fastball, and that's great for us to get to Sunday and have the opportunity to use (Alex) Pham. We gotta get a quality start from (Grant) Nechak and offensively we need to execute better."
 
Perhaps the game's biggest hit for USF came with two outs in the top of the seventh. Brandon Greim hit a first-pitch double to the right-center field gap, scoring Munoz from first base and tallying the Dons' seventh run of the game – which would prove to be the difference.
 
Santa Clara got hits from seven of nine starters, including two multi-hit games out of Michael O'Hara (2 for 5) and Reyes (2 for 3). The Broncos stranded eight runners of their own Saturday and went 2 for 11 (.182) with runners in scoring position.
 
The Dons will go for their second consecutive sweep of the Broncos (2019) on Sunday, with game three scheduled for a noon start. Right-hander Grant Nechak is slated to start for USF. Fans can find all live coverage links on USFDons.com.
 
"It's hard to win three in a row," said Giarratano. "We've gotta play well. We gotta play better defense than we did today, we gotta execute better with runners in scoring position than we did today. We had a lot of really good at-bats with two outs, we just didn't do very well with less than two outs."