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Best Mallet Putters of 2024
Everyone experiences grief on the greens. The key is to mitigate those moments. Meet mallet putters. Their bulk provides better stability on mis-hits and aggressive alignment aids—both beneficial to everyday golfers. To be fair, the look can be tough to swallow at times. However, most have dialed back the aesthetics to where only a few look like a science-fair project gone badly wrong. Better yet, today’s mallets make use of multiple materials to make your worst putts roll like your best putts. Because most of us hit many more worst putts than best putts, this is a category you might want to consider.
The appeal of Bettinardi’s putter shaping is that the designs look like something from a simpler era. The company’s milling process, however, is built on a seamless blending of old-world vision and modern-day precision. The face’s flymill pattern creates a uniform feel, sound and control from heel to toe. The subtle sloping of the shoulders in the back flange frames a ball-width cavity and centers the putterhead’s mass to stabilize aim and stroke.
Designers of mallet putters can be guilty of over-engineering everything—from moment of inertia to center of gravity—and forget about how the face feels at impact. That’s why the Bettinardi team uses the tour-preferred 303 stainless steel from its blade putters in a single piece at the front of these four large mallets. A back piece of softer aluminum provides the stability and alignment features mallet users demand.
As any 6-year-old schooling us at Volcano Mini-Golf reminds us, putting is easy. Cobra knows better, and that’s why these putters are engineered to compensate for erratic strokes. Custom 3-D printed internal structures save mass that is used to monumentally increase stability on off-center hits for better distance control. The face has staggered lofts from top to bottom to ensure that wherever we make contact, our putts launch the same way. Take that, rug rat.
The musical “Shrek” reminds us that we need to raise our freak flag high because, to paraphrase, weird for a purpose works. L.A.B. Golf’s putters are a good example in golf. Their distinctive looks belie a foundational idea that is irrefutable: If a putter’s weighting keeps it square to its lie angle (like this one does with its sole-weighted aluminum body), it’s going to square up. The company’s original Directed Force putter reveled in that idea, and this third generation continues in the same freakish but sleeker shape.
Most of us think of the putter face as a study in feel, but the engineers at Odyssey thought, Why can’t we get the face to be active and flexing on putts, too? The key was using artificial intelligence to produce the strangely bumpy back of the face. This insert uses “micro-deflections” to help mis-hits roll nearly as well as center strikes. When it comes to feel, is there anything better than fewer three putts?
To design its putter face Odyssey’s engineers looked to titanium for its light weight, strength and flexibility. They needed the face’s intricately varied indentations—designed through a range of artificial-intelligence simulations—to respond to every impact like a high-performance race car moving across an undulating road. These titanium faces have “micro-deflections” to direct energy to the ball for consistent distances.
It seems appropriate that the process for milling one of these classic, compact designs takes about the time of a round of golf. Each seems just about as intricate, with these milled designs mixing tour player insight and design-engineer smarts. The angles, curves and weight placements are designed to produce cleaner strokes and smoother roll. The deep-milled face pattern throughout is intended to provide a soft feel.
This line looks as subtle as a row of M9 armored earthmovers: big and bold and unwavering at impact. The key to the stability of these heads, however, is their soft and light insides. These mallets use the same polymer filling found inside PXG’s hollow-body irons to save weight in the middle and push it to the perimeter to increase the moment of inertia (stability on off-center hits) by 10 percent over the previous versions.
TaylorMade returns to the core shape of its Spider from five years ago, one of the most successful versions of the mallet brand that has become an icon. What’s intriguing is from that base model, the company is launching a collection of five versions that share the same concepts of high stability with clear alignment and a face with grooves to enhance initial roll. Helped by research in recent years that shows how different players respond to center-of-gravity depth, each model pushes weight selectively back or forward.
Scotty Cameron putters make for an artistic and immensely practical tool. With his milled mallet line, Cameron wants us to see where we’re going through subtle aim and alignment clues. Notice how the angles and edges often point down the target line or how the shaft bends aim down the line, too. An array of dots, lines or arrows focus your eye line.
These traditional mallets almost clandestinely improve stability through a weight-saving sole plate and tungsten heel-and-toe sole weights. Of course, they still look like they should be displayed on velvet pillows under glass. As Cameron says, “Get the weight redistribution right without making the putter look cumbersome.” The milling pattern combines a deep mill with a second pass that trims off the peaks for softness with consistency.
Like Tom Hanks in “Big” questioning what was fun about a toy building turning into a robot, these putters question the conventional wisdom. Instead of pushing weight far back from the face for a higher moment of inertia, Cleveland’s take is that such a deep center of gravity leads to mis-directed putts. Instead, the weighting is more forward with heel and toe weights up front. That combination yields less face rotation on mis-hits for plenty of stability with even better directional control. What’s not fun about that?
Don’t let the simple-looking designs fool you. Each putter’s perimeter weighting, hosel style and grip are distinct enough to resonate with different strokes, and custom counterbalanced weights provide a deeper fit. These “simple” putters technologically upstage almost all putters by using an array of face-milling patterns. Rather than one pattern for the whole line, each model has a milling density to perfectly combine with the head’s built-in forgiveness. These sleek, techy putters do all of this for a third of the price of some other brands.
The mission of a mallet is to minimize off-center strikes, but that fixes only part of the problem. These putters use a face design that staggers loft from top to bottom, 1 degree on the bottom of the face increasing by 1 degree three times to 4 degrees at the top of the face. In that way, when we mis-hit our putts high or low on the face, the ball still launches at the same angle, reducing skid and producing better roll.
One of the great mysteries of modern times is why driver fittings (the most random of strokes) are so much more popular than putter fittings (the most repeatable of strokes). Edel takes a modular approach to finding your perfect putting match. With these designs you can choose one of three shapes, and each shape accommodates four hosel choices, six alignment options and four grips. Those combine to include 300 intuitive combinations that make finding the ideal putter for your stroke not so mysterious at all.
We like mallet putters the way we like grandmothers: They’re so forgiving. Sometimes, though, attempts at forgiveness in a mallet go too far. These traditional shapes get it right. Unlike extreme heads that require substantial mass deep in the perimeter, these classic looks find forgiveness in a grooved face insert. The spacing and individual widths create consistent energy transfer across the face, so like grandma’s change purse full of rare silver dollars, the forgiveness is bigger than it looks.
Moment of inertia sounds wonky, but it’s simple: “Replace heavy with light wherever you can. Then redistribute heavy to make the head deliver consistent speed for every impact.” LA Golf’s mallets get rid of “heavy” in the body, replacing it entirely with “light” (carbon composite, which is five times less dense than steel). This frees up room to redistribute “heavy” (super dense tungsten) at the tips of this pronged mallet. The result is ultra-high MOI, or stability on off-center hits so that your worst hits still roll close to your best hits.
Pythagoras may not have discovered the theorem about the lengths of the sides of a triangle—it was probably the Babylonians—but that ancient wisdom just might unlock putter fitting. Never Compromise borrows that triangle science to get every golfer a custom-fit putter in five quick steps. Perfected by noted instructor Todd Sones, it dials in the proper shaft length by finding the hypotenuse formed by how far you stand from the ball and the height of the grip in your hands. The only downside: Neither Pythagoras nor the Babylonians revealed any secrets about avoiding the three-putt.