Bryan Balzer, SD (A) vs Aiden Foeller, LAD (A) 4/5/25

(Shoutout to my guy Jay for ask­ing about Balz­er and get­ting me to turn this game on.)

The Padres signed a young Japan­ese-Amer­i­can out of Japan dur­ing the Jan­u­ary 2023 Inter­na­tion­al sign­ing peri­od named Bryan Balz­er. He made his full-sea­son debut Sat­ur­day, throw­ing 51 (59 Strk%) pitch­es across three innings. With no 2023 game action and only sev­en 2024 com­plex innings on his pro resume, a social media and Google search won’t yield much, and Ran­cho’s broad­cast won’t give us great per­spec­tive either. Balz­er got my atten­tion in a good way. Don’t scout the stat line. It’s not the great­est sto­ry­teller. Some hits and three runs hap­pened the first inning, but Balz­er was just get­ting his feet wet, almost exclu­sive­ly throw­ing fast­balls. Balz­er was jovial dur­ing a mound vis­it with the score­board on the verge of going lop­sided. The real show start­ed in the sec­ond inning, where­upon he threw only strikes. It only last­ed eight pitch­es over three bat­ters, but it con­tained 96 mph fast­balls (per booth), a change­up, and some break­ing balls. Ran­cho’s broad­cast does­n’t let us get all the signs, and this angle is hor­ri­ble for a right-hand­ed pitch­er, but Balz­er was throw­ing at least two dif­fer­ent fast­balls, pos­si­bly three. Whether his “four-seam” cuts nat­u­ral­ly or there’s a sep­a­rate cut­ter is YTD. With­out some veloc­i­ty read­ings, it’s hard to tell if there are mul­ti­ple break­ing balls or not, but I’d guess there was one. A tweet claims Balz­er has hit triple dig­its with the fast­ball. The fol­low­ing video is said sec­ond inning, plus a three-pitch strike­out of his final bat­ter faced:

There isn’t a lot to take away from this look. Balz­er has a strong low­er half, great bal­ance through deliv­ery, and some pho­tos on social media show him drop­ping and dri­ving far down the mound. Col­or me intrigued and look­ing for­ward to tun­ing into his next out­ing.

Balzar’s coun­ter­part, Aiden Foeller, the Dodgers’ 2024 11th round pick out of South­ern Illi­nois, got my atten­tion in a good way as well. Anoth­er right-han­der, we suf­fer the same defi­cien­cies, but again come away with a desire to see more. Foeller is good-sized, list­ed at 6′3″ 220 lbs. Per the booth, the fast­ball was touch­ing 97. Here’s the entire­ty of his ama­teur career logged on Base­ball Ref­er­ence:

Foeller filled up the zone, throw­ing 74% of his 73 pitch­es for strikes, giv­ing up six hits across 4.1 IP, strik­ing out eight and walk­ing one. I count­ed 19 whiffs on the day. Here they are:

A firm slid­er or cut­ter mixed in with a four-seam­er? Maybe the slid­er is slow­er or there’s a slow­er break­er? More ques­tions than answers regard­ing the arse­nal at this point, but there might be some legit nasty com­ing out of that arm slot. Look­ing for­ward to see­ing Foeller again, and if the Dodger pitch­ing love dynasty own­ers tend to have, finds its way here.

Back to muddylooks.com home