SAN DIEGO -- So continues the Padres' roller coaster.

In each of their last eight games entering Tuesday’s opener against the Mariners, the Padres had alternated wins and losses. And they’d won on Monday night.

Sure enough, San Diego remains in search of that elusive winning streak after a 4-1 defeat to Seattle at Petco Park. The current trend is almost maddeningly baffling.

It’s not merely that the Padres have rotated wins and losses. It’s the nature of those wins and losses. In their last four wins, they’ve broken out offensively, scoring at least five runs in each. Then, after each of those four breakout victories, they followed by scoring precisely once, as was the case on Tuesday.

Consistent in their inconsistency, at least.

“That’s what I would say is frustrating, as a team,” said Padres manager Bob Melvin. “Is that we play a good game, and then we don’t follow it up. We’ve talked often about: We’ve got to put together several good games in a row to get on a run and feel a little bit better about ourselves. We haven’t been able to play two in a row, really.”

The Padres haven’t won consecutive games since May 25 and 26 against the Nationals and Yankees. They haven’t won three straight since they followed their two-game sweep of the Giants in Mexico City with a win over the Reds on May 1.

The Padres insist they’re capable of reeling off a hot streak -- and with the track records of the players in this lineup, they probably should feel that way. And yet, a winning streak of any length remains elusive.

“If there would be a perfect answer to that, we would’ve had it already,” said Fernando Tatis Jr., who went 1-for-4 with a double and plated the Padres’ only run with an RBI groundout. “But their starter, he was making pitches. … They just got us today.”

Right-hander Joe Musgrove was by no means at his best. He found himself in some deep counts and needed 102 pitches to get through five innings. He was particularly flummoxed by Mariners leadoff man J.P. Crawford, who saw 25 pitches in his three plate appearances against the Padres right-hander.

“Pitch count, really it was just Crawford,” Musgrove said. “He took up a quarter of my pitches, I think. ... He was tough. I was throwing everything I had at him. He was fouling pitches off, really good pitches, taking the good pitches just out of the zone. He just gave me a lot of trouble tonight.”

Nonetheless, Musgrove surrendered only one run and has now notched a 1.04 ERA over his past three starts (two earned runs in 17 1/3 innings) -- partly a product of some recent mechanical tweaks. But the San Diego offense offered Musgrove only a run of support against Mariners righty Logan Gilbert.

Rougned Odor led off the third inning with a double against Gilbert. From there, Austin Nola showed bunt and worked a walk, before Ha-Seong Kim bunted both over. That put two men in scoring position for Tatis and Juan Soto.

“We’ve got two baserunners there,” Melvin said of the decision to bunt. “Against a pretty good pitcher, we’re trying to get our big boys up and score a couple runs.”

They got one on Tatis’ groundout, but Nola was stranded at third, and the Padres wouldn’t score again. Seattle took the lead in the sixth on Teoscar Hernández’s solo homer off Brent Honeywell. In the eighth, Steven Wilson, who hadn’t allowed a run since April, coughed up two more.

In between, Tom Cosgrove recorded the 13th straight scoreless outing to start his career, the longest streak in franchise history. But on the whole, it wasn’t the sparkling effort the Padres have been accustomed to from their bullpen -- which entered the day with the lowest ERA in the NL at 3.11.

Of course, no bullpen is ever perfect, and the Padres can’t expect much more than what they’ve gotten from theirs recently. It’s hard to apportion much blame to that unit, particularly when the offense mustered one run on four hits.

“Sometimes you tip your cap and go get ‘em tomorrow,” Musgrove said. “When we’re struggling like this, you can’t sit here and say ‘[Dang], here we go again.’ Sometimes guys just beat us, and they play better than us. … It’s a long season. You’ve got to just be able to put these behind you, show up tomorrow, try to split the series.”

Indeed, the Padres now find themselves in an agonizingly familiar position, trying to keep the roller coaster going for one more day.