  We investigate properties of baryons in a family of holographic field
theories related to the Sakai-Sugimoto model of holographic QCD. Starting with
the $N_f=2$ Sakai-Sugimoto model, we truncate to a 5D Yang-Mills action for the
gauge fields associated with the noncompact directions of the flavour
D8-branes. We define a free parameter $\gamma$ that controls the strength of
this Yang-Mills term relative to the Chern-Simons term that couples the abelian
gauge field to the SU(2) instanton density. Moving away from $\gamma = 0$
should incorporate some of the effects of taking the Sakai-Sugimoto model away
from large 't Hooft coupling $\lambda$. In this case, the baryon ground state
corresponds to an oblate SU(2) instanton on the bulk flavour branes: the usual
SO(4) symmetric instanton is deformed to spread more along the field theory
directions than the radial direction. We numerically construct these
anisotropic instanton solutions for various values of $\gamma$ and calculate
the mass and baryon charge profile of the corresponding baryons. Using the
value $\gamma = 2.55$ that has been found to best fit the mesonic spectrum of
QCD, we find a value for the baryon mass of 1.19 GeV, significantly more
realistic than the value 1.60 GeV computed previously using an SO(4) symmetric
ansatz for the instanton.
