Upon acquiring Aroldis Chapman in the summer of 2016, Chicago Cubs head honcho Theo Epstein offered a quote that sums up the swashbuckling required at the trade deadline: “If not now…perhaps some other time.”Maybe I’m getting that quote wrong.Anyway, the Milwaukee Brewers were not able to put together a package to acquire Detroit Tigers ace Tarik Skubal. Instead, he joins the Los Angeles Dodgers’ already stacked rotation.The Brewers still have Sunday and Monday to improve a rotation that looks shakier after recent injuries to Brandon Woodruff and Kyle Harrison. Milwaukee will most likely get better. But they won’t be adding the back-to-back American League Cy Young Award winner.As the sport continues to process Skubal joining the Dodgers in a late Saturday trade, reactions from rival executives have landed somewhere between resignation and frustration. The three-prospect package going to the Tigers seems like a reasonable price for two months of a pitcher who underwent surgery to remove loose bodies in his elbow in May. Even so, it is a package that the Brewers (or the Tampa Bay Rays, or the New York Yankees, or the Chicago Cubs, or, frankly, a lot of teams) could have beaten.The Brewers are one of the best-run teams in the sport, and are currently enjoying their best stretch of baseball in franchise history. They reached this point through canny trades, fruitful international signings and relentless discipline. The team has made the postseason in seven of the past eight seasons, and they currently have the best record in baseball. Yet Milwaukee had the best record in baseball last year, and they still got trounced by the Dodgers in the National League Championship Series. The Brewers haven’t been to the World Series since 1982.So if not now, when?The hard part for Brewers fans to stomach is that the answer may be never. At least, the team may never shove its chips into the center of the table to gamble on a handful of starts from a rental pitcher. Giving up a young, cost-controlled starter like Logan Henderson or Brandon Sproat or Shane Drohan simply hurts the small-market Brewers more than giving up River Ryan means to the Dodgers.That does not mean Milwaukee will never be able to compete with the Dodgers. They could easily beat them this October. (Odds are, someone will.) But the idea of the team executing a reprise of the 2008 acquisition of CC Sabathia always felt unlikely. There is still time to get better before the trade deadline, although it will require a bit more creativity than simply putting together the best package to land Skubal.Maybe, come October, the Brewers will regret their adherence to discipline. Or maybe, for once in their franchise history, the vagaries of postseason baseball will tilt in their favor. Stranger things have happened.