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Best Blade Putters of 2024
Brad Faxon, one of the game’s best putters, once said “Putters are like a piece of art or a girlfriend. You have to be attracted to it first and then you’ve got to get along with it.” That sums up blade putters. Although not as sophisticated technologically as mallets, blade putters sure look pretty and produce that connection among ball, putter and you at impact that is indescribable yet understood by everyone. That’s not to say today’s blades are like Johnny Miller’s old Bulls Eye. With roll-enhancing face treatments, putts leave the face with a pure roll. Even better is the use of perimeter weighting to deliver the kind of mis-hit forgiveness usually reserved for mallets. The putter is the club you love to love—especially when you hear the ball fall into the hole. Here are 18 to consider. We’re confident you’ll be attracted to at least one—and likely get along with it, too.
A certain juice company touts its beverages as “100 percent un-fooled around with.” In golf, that company could be called Simply Bettinardi. These unfooled-around with designs eschew face inserts and screw weights and are milled from a block of 303 stainless steel. The pocket cavity and flange shift the center of gravity in line with the center of the face for crisper contact. A uniform “flymilling” pattern on the face stretches from heel to toe for consistent sound, feel and energy transfer.
When Evnroll founder and longtime putter designer Guerin Rife first designed a putter with grooves, players consistently left putts short because the grooves softened the energy transfer at impact. Change the design of the grooves, he reasoned, and he could better control ball speed across the face. Rife continues to refine that idea on these classic blades with a soft aluminum face insert that produces consistent distance and direction.
Golf seems smitten with milled putters as if they were some kind of farm-to-table quiche pan. Meridian takes your artisanal-cheese swooning and makes its finished tool more practical and technologically efficient. Rather than milling putters one at a time, a special process might cut a dozen or more blades out of that single block at once. Those blanks are then finished with another precise milling process that includes three face patterns for three different feels. All that mass customization takes these delightfully authentic blades to a place rarely seen in golf today: affordability.
As greens have gotten faster, and average putting strokes have gotten yippier, putterheads in response got heavier. When Mizuno’s team, which had offered a weight kit with its original M.Craft lineup, saw more users opt for the heaviest possible configuration of those weights, the OMOI was born. The stock heads are almost 20 grams heavier than some standard models, shifting the club’s balance point lower and leading to more consistency in face rotation. One other thing all yippy putters need is more forgiveness on off-center hits.
Blade putters that stretch the boundaries of off-center-hit forgiveness to mallet-like levels seem more prevalent these days than pickleball injuries. Rather than dull the center, though, Odyssey’s team found a method to keep the center speed and raise it for mis-hits. Although that probably sounds like alchemy, for Odyssey it’s all about machine learning and artificial intelligence. The odd topology on the back of these faces creates “microdeflections” for consistent rollout. The urethane face coating makes all that technology feel like the company’s most favored White Hot insert.
A titanium face on a putter would seem to make as much sense as a 6.2 liter V8 Hemi in a Dodge Caravan. Titanium is what makes driver faces hot, and a hot putter face seems like a recipe for binge drinking, but think again. Titanium is thin, light and strong—the kind of alloy that has great flexure properties. Flexing matters when you’re trying to create a putter face that intricately responds to the slightest variations in thickness, all created through artificial-intelligence simulations. Those thicknesses yield similar roll across the face.
It involves a highly automated, computer-controlled process, but don’t assume milled putters are as easy to churn out as belt buckles or Zippo lighters. A lot of machinations make possible the beauty and complex efficiency behind these iconic Anser blade shapes. Every curve and angle was meticulously interpreted from elite player input and then matched with specifically locating the most effective centers of gravity, weighting and even sole curvature. The purpose of all this precision is to make every stroke more, well, automatic.
Piretti’s Mike Johnson knows the iconic Anser shape started as a more technically precise putting tool before becoming a jewelry piece in recent years. He prides his milled-blade designs on their artistic approach to form, but he believes function plays an equal role. That’s why these blades feature heavier heads to smooth out strokes on today’s faster greens, sole weights so that those head weights match shaft lengths and a 2.5-degree loft angle to better align with modern mowing heights.
For all the bodacious TV ads, you might forget that PXG is dead serious about one of the less sexy aspects of the business. Fitting is central to PXG’s philosophy, and that’s especially true for putters. These blades, which feature super-thin faces supported by a feel- and forgiveness-enhancing polymer fill, come with an array of hosel options ranging from heel-shafted to armlock. The heel and toe weight ports on the sole can further customize the look you want fit to the stroke you have.
Like an EV or solar power or a flexitarian diet, SeeMore’s putters keep reminding us they really are a better idea. Around for a quarter-century, SeeMore did not invent alignment technology in putters, but it remains its most ardent adherent. If putting is a search for consistent results, it starts with a certain consistency in method. SeeMore’s hide-the-dot system breeds such consistency, leading to more reliable aim and a repeatable stroke. Copper weights in the sole, heel and toe add stability to the milled-aluminum body.
Someday we want someone to talk about us the way Scotty Cameron talks about his putters. His tone about these blades seems to emanate from a cathedral, and why not? Their dominance in the milled-blade marketplace isn’t an accident. Cameron and his team comb over every detail and resource to improve these designs without changing them. Subtle tweaks like milling out sections of the plumber’s neck and the iconic “cherry dots” redistribute mass to heel and toe sole weights. Cameron says that makes his blades “as forgiving as a large mallet.” Sweet talker.
Given the technological efforts in its design and manufacture, this putter sports a price that seems like a misprint. These bargain blades stoutly cater to two stroke types, use different grips to accommodate those strokes and produce the same manufacturing tolerances as a $300 putter. Most importantly, the complex milling pattern on the face with its varying density specific to each model normalizes ball speed on mis-hits.
Milling a putter serves a purpose. Although generally expensive, perfectly cutting the metal from a solid block of steel (as opposed to poring a liquefied metal into a mold) results in a consistent-feeling putter. Cleveland’s R&D team sought a more affordable approach, only milling the critical parts of a cast putter blank. The milling creates the face’s varying surface-texture densities for consistent ball speed and eliminates porosity in the raw cast head for better feel.
Computer-driven 3-D printing has been part of golf-club prototype design for two decades, but it had no practical value in making finished clubs. Cobra’s engineers found a way to 3-D print certain parts that could not be cast, forged or machined by traditional means. The intricate nylon lattice structure in the heel and toe sections is one-seventh the density of steel yet provides a stable core that supports the heavier materials around it. The support provided by the 3-D printed section damps vibration for better sound and feel.
Putters usually don’t come up in the rollback discussion, but the insert used in these relatively traditional-shaped blades might raise an eyebrow. Light, soft and flexible Pebax is a “block copolymer” that has been referred to as “technological doping.” This has to do with its use in running shoes and its ability to be soft and resilient in terms of energy return. That’s a good thing for a putter seeking consistent roll out on mis-hits. Of course, it also helps that the insert varies loft from top to bottom for a skid-free consistent launch.
LA Golf, known for its high-performance driver shafts, must look at other putters that use heel-and-toe weighting and laugh. The heads are made of superlight carbon composite, and the tungsten weights in the heel and toe account for nearly 200 grams, or about four times as much as a typical blade putter. The result is stability on off-center hits that’s a third higher than the highest blade putters on the market. More stability means more putts roll the same distance and direction.
Golf’s equipment landscape is awash in things that make no sense, and the biggest one might be how few golfers get fit for a putter. A Golf Datatech study showed that driver fittings outnumber putter fittings by more than three to one. Given you’re putting more than twice as often as you’re driving, perhaps it’s time for a reset. Enter Never Compromise, which makes a proper shaft length as automatic as eighth-grade geometry. The system includes getting that cut-to-order shaft length on your new putter almost instantly.
Sometimes sexy is smart, like, say George Clooney. Sometimes smart is sexy, like, say, Amal Clooney. In putters, Piretti designs might be both smart and sexy. Milled from 303 stainless steel and thankfully unbedazzled, every curve, angle and mill mark seems fully considered thanks to tour-player input. The heavier stock head weight smooths out the stroke, and the slightly lower lofts work well on today’s faster greens. That’s just smart, but none of that gets in the way of how these heads look, like when Amal and George address the U.N.