3 Dodgers free agents who will leave, and 2 who will return in 2024

Dodgers Free Agent Who Will Leave: Lance Lynn

There was a time -- not that long ago! -- where we would've wondered whether the Dodgers would pick up Lynn's $18 million option or find a cheaper way to keep him in town. Either way, Lynn in Dodger Blue in 2024 felt like a fait accompli.

Now that he's coming off a history-making playoff homer fest, as a 36-year-old whose magic fastball appears to be zapped? Yeah. Uh. Enjoy San Francisco?

Lynn shouldn't be "$18 million expensive" next season, and the Dodgers certainly do have plenty of holes in the rotation that must be filled. But if Lynn didn't pick up what Mark Prior was putting down this summer, why would it suddenly click over the winter?

Despite insistence that they could "fix" him, Lynn instead messed around and confounded the Dodgers' brass like a trifling romantic partner. His ERA went down, but the strikeouts -- the thing LA was banking on -- decreased. Lynn whiffed 144 men in 119.2 innings in Chicago, but a paltry 47 in 64 innings with the Dodgers. He was acquired to miss bats. He stopped missing them when he arrived, leading to an FIP increase from 5.19 to 6.16 once he got to California.

Someone's going to touch him with a 10-foot pole, but it shouldn't be Andrew Friedman.