Traditional lines are blurred, which gives you more options
When it comes to how to improve your putting, the debate over whether a blade putter or a mallet is a smarter solution seems as dubious as deciding whether vanilla or chocolate is a better flavour of ice cream. (Chocolate, obviously.)
The issue really isn’t whether blades provide a simpler, more natural look at address and better feel for distance control, or whether mallets provide more built-in forgiveness and alignment features for more consistency – even at the game’s highest level. Case in point: Scottie Scheffler [opposite page] is a recent convert from blade to mallet.
No, it doesn’t matter whether you gravitate towards a mallet or blade. With the plethora of fitting tools and stroke analytics available to sort out how one style works better than another, the starting point in your search for a new putter shouldn’t be about deciding once and for all that you are a blade fan or a mallet fan. One shape will produce results that give you more confidence. The right tool for you should be dialed into your length and alignment requirements. Then, it’s a matter of understanding results (distance control, consistency of contact, truer roll, etc.), not simply leaning on the model that you’ve holed the most putts with.
There have been some long-standing thoughts about whether the blade – generally with its hosel attached in the heel, creating what’s called “toe hang” – works better with strokes that have more arc to them. Conversely, some say the mallet – generally with a more face-balanced orientation – fits strokes that are more straight back and straight through. But because of new methods of internal weighting, mallets now can feature toe hang and work well with an arc stroke.
Chris Marchini, director of golf experience for Golf Galaxy and chief fitter for our Hot List, doesn’t think the differences are clear-cut anymore.
“We’re starting to look at what kind of putter works with what kind of stroke, and we’re seeing evidence that it’s not even the case most of the time that face-balanced putters work with one kind of stroke and toe-hang putters work with a different kind of stroke,” Marchini says.
There are, he says, a lot of variables in play, including how far back the centre of gravity might be on one putter versus another, and whether that internal weighting better aligns itself with a particular stroke. Nick Sherburne, founder at Club Champion where he wrote the training manual for the fitters at the company’s 143 facilities, also has seen the shift towards mallets. “Teachers and teaching aids have pushed folks away from an arcing stroke to more straight-back, straight-through, which lends itself better to a mallet,” he says.
In addition, today’s mallets can have more of the feel you’ve previously had only with blades while building in more features for aim and consistency. That’s what we’ve seen with Scheffler’s switch to a mallet that helped key his run to a dominant position as world No.1. Scheffler’s TaylorMade Spider Tour X L-neck helped give him a similar control that he had in a blade, plus more forgiveness. The result was an 87-spot jump in rank in strokes gained putting.
Of the top 30 players in the world right now, 23 use mallet putters, including five of the top 10 and three of the top five, a fundamental shift from 20 years ago, when 17 of the top 20 players in the world preferred blades.
Is there something that has made mallets a more fashionable go-to? A look at our Hot List scoring shows a slight preference overall for mallets. Specifically, when our players provide scores for putters, they give us a 1-5 preference for Look, Sound/Feel and Performance, where “1” is worst and “5” is best. If you look at the average Performance scores for all players for all mallets that made the Hot List, that score is slightly higher than the score for blade putters that made the list. The median Performance score for any mallet from our players’ ratings was 4.02, and the median for all blades was 3.96.
That’s not a huge advantage, but what makes it more telling is that our players were giving a significantly higher Look score to blades than they were mallets (3.88 to 3.76). In other words, our players might not have been in love with the appearance of a mallet, but they were very much smitten by the results.
Mallets may not have the jewellery-like appeal of a classic blade, but their versatility is an overwhelming benefit. If you were to make a switch, we can’t promise Scheffler-like results, but we don’t think you’d be giving up anything, either.
Photos Jared C. Tilton
