SAN DIEGO -- There was a healthy contingent of red-clad fans clustered in the Petco Park stands behind the visitors’ dugout Wednesday night. Those Cardinals faithful came to the ballpark hoping to see Albert Pujols make baseball history. They then pivoted to cheering when he prevented it.

Pujols got no closer to career home run No. 700 as Padres starter Blake Snell took a no-hitter into the seventh inning. It was Pujols who ended the no-no bid, poking a ground-ball single through the vacated right side of the infield with two outs.

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The Cardinals avoided the ignominy of being no-hit, but the no-run issue remained. The Padres prevailed, 1-0 -- the Cardinals’ third straight shutout loss. Stretching back to the first game of a doubleheader on Saturday, the Cardinals have scored one run -- unearned -- across 43 innings.

“Here’s the deal,” manager Oliver Marmol said. “I have more confidence in this group now than I did when we were killing the league with offense and nobody was talking about us not scoring runs. I have more confidence in the things we are able to do as a club today than I did a month ago.”

St. Louis hadn’t been shut out in three straight games since the 100-win 2015 squad closed the regular season with a lost weekend in Atlanta. Whereas that team had already clinched the NL Central title when the offense went dormant, the current version still has work to do.

The Cardinals have a healthy lead in the NL Central -- 7 1/2 games over Milwaukee -- but they have not clinched a postseason berth. The magic number is six, and the Cards know they need to get the offense in order sooner than October. September wins are needed, too.

So what gives Marmol the confidence those wins are coming?

“You can tell about people when they go through what we’re going through right now -- how they respond to it,” Marmol said. “That tells you a lot about who they are, their character, their ability to fight through it.

“I have a ton of confidence in them, and they have a ton of confidence in themselves.”

Right-hander Miles Mikolas kept the Cardinals within one swing of changing the game by turning in a standout pitching performance of his own: six innings, three hits, one unearned run, six strikeouts. Mikolas got at least three whiffs from each of his four pitch types (four-seamer, slider, curve, sinker). The curveball can be a key indicator for him, and he got five whiffs from nine swings on the pitch.

“Pretty happy with my stuff,” Mikolas said. “I was fairly efficient, located well. Curveball and slider were good. … There’s a sense of competition out there. Snell had a great game today, and it stinks to be on the other side of that.”

Pujols’ seventh-inning single against a defensive shift could have been a game-changer. Juan Yepez followed with a single to put Pujols in scoring position, but Snell struck out Paul DeJong swinging at a 97.9 mph fastball on the left-hander’s 117th and final pitch.

Snell had never thrown a pitch faster than 98.5 mph before Wednesday. He threw three faster than that against the Cardinals, including a 98.6 mph four-seamer to get Pujols swinging in the second inning.

Yepez said Snell’s “stuff was on point,” with a sharp back-foot slider to complement the high-velocity fastballs. But the Cardinals are less interested in tipping caps to opponents than they are in getting that one hit, that one big inning to get out of the current rut.

“Teams go through stretches like that,” Yepez said. “We keep working at it every day, and I know we’ll get out of it.”

The bullpen door swinging open brought no change in fortune for the Cardinals, who were retired in order by Robert Suarez in the eighth inning and by former division foe Josh Hader in the ninth.

Pujols, sitting at 698 career homers, watched from the on-deck circle as Nolan Arenado bounced back to the mound for the final out.