Hot List Extra
Are mallet putters better than blades? What our Hot List player ratings reveal
Jared C. Tilton
When it comes to how best to improve your game on the greens, the debate over whether the blade or the mallet is a better solution seems as dubious a pursuit as deciding whether vanilla or chocolate is a better flavor of ice cream. (Chocolate, obviously … ) The issue really isn’t whether blades provide a more natural look at address and feel at impact for better overall direction and distance control, or whether mallets provide more built-in forgiveness and alignment features to create more consistency for strokes that need help even at the highest level (see Scottie Scheffler).
No, it doesn’t matter in any practical sense whether you gravitate toward a mallet or blade. With the plethora of fitting tools and stroke analytics to help any golfer gain a clearer understanding of how one style of putter is going to work 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 user 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, with a specific focus on making sure the sole of your putter rests squarely on the ground at address. Then, it’s a matter of understanding results (distance control, consistency of center face contact, truer roll, etc.), not simply leaning on the model that you’ve holed the most putts with.
It is true that there have been some long-standing thoughts about whether a blade, generally with its hosel attached in the heel, works best with strokes that have more arc to them. Conversely, there is the long-standing saw that putters with a more face-balanced orientation will work best with strokes that are more straight back and through.
Of note: Putters with more of heel-based orientation feature what’s called toe hang, which reflects the natural tendency of the face to more easily open and close within the stroke. Toe hang is easy to see when you balance the putter on its shaft on the edge of a table with the head hanging over the edge. The greater the angle that the toe points from straight perpendicular shows how easy it is to manipulate. Meanwhile, when a putter is described as “face-balanced,” its face will point straight up to the sky when balanced on the edge of a table. It is generally more often the case that mallets are face-balanced than blades, but increasingly because of new ways of weighting mallets internally, these larger heads can feature toe hang to make them more easy to swing on an arc stroke. Here's a deeper dive on how toe-hang and face-balanced are determined, from the club component website Hireko.
A face-balanced putter (left) positions its center of gravity in line with the shaft, while in a toe-hang putter the CG is aligned on the heel side of center to varying degrees.
Or so has been the thinking. Chris Marchini, director of golf experience for Golf Galaxy and the chief fitter at the Hot List, doesn’t think it’s that simple anymore.
“We’re really starting to take a look at what kind of putter works with what kind of player and what kind of stroke, and right now, 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,” he said. “I’ve seen plenty of times where you think a player that pulls putts will still pull putts with a face-balanced putter, and a player that pushes putts will still push them with a toe-hang putter.”
There are, he said, a lot of variables in play, including perhaps how far back the center of gravity might be on one putter vs. 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 135 facilities, has seen the shift toward mallets, as well. “Teachers and teaching aids have pushed folks away from an arcing stroke to more of a straight-back, straight-through motion, which lends itself better to a mallet,” he said.
Of course, mallets have more options to go along with better forgiveness and alignment features today than blades can match. Indeed, mallets can have more of the feel in your stroke you’ve previously only had in blades while building in more features to dial in aim and consistency. That’s exactly what we’ve seen with Scheffler’s switch from a blade 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 previously had in a blade with more forgiveness. The result is a 71-spot jump in his rank in strokes gained putting, moving from a negative number to a positive one.
Of the top 30 players in the world right now, 21 use mallet putters, including seven of the top 10 and four of the top 5, 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 natural go-to, or even something less direct that makes players of any kind prefer mallets over blades? A look at our Hot List scoring shows a slight preference overall for mallets over blades. Specifically, when our players provide scores for putter ratings, they give us a 1-5 preference for Look, Sound/Feel and Performance, where “1” is quite terrible and “5” is quite excellent. If you look at the average Performance scores for all players for all mallets that made the list, that score is slightly higher than a similar average score for Performance for the blade putters that made the Hot List. The median Performance score for any mallet from our players’ ratiings was 4.02, while the median for all blades was 3.96.
Admittedly, it’s not a huge advantage, but what makes that advantage more telling is that our players were giving a much higher Look score to blades than they were mallets (3.88 to 3.76). In other words, mallets were working better than the initial impression at address might have led our players to believe. Or more precisely, our players might not have been in love with the looks of a mallet but they were very much smitten by the results.
The mallet may not have the jewelry-like sex appeal of a blade, but its versatility is an overwhelming benefit. If you decide to branch out from a lifelong affinity for the classic blade, be clear that it matches up with the right length and weight (both overall head weight and internal weighting) for your stroke. We can’t promise Scheffler-like results, but we don’t really see how you’d be giving up anything, either.