By Ryan Barath via Golf.com
This past week at the Zurich Classic, Rory McIlroy and Shane Lowry had a lot in common — beyond the fact that they’re both major winners and hail from Ireland. Lowry and McIlroy also used a TaylorMade Spider, which is the hottest putter in golf at this point in the 2024 PGA Tour season.
While it’s easy to give credit to a putter that has been used by Scottie Scheffler for each of his four wins in 2024, even with those accounted for, a Spider putter has been used for four additional victories. Nick Taylor (WM Phoenix Open), Jake Knapp (Mexico Open) and now Lowry and McIlroy.
This Spider putter streak is also a part of a larger trend among the best players in the world slowly moving away from blade-style putters and into mallets for extra help with alignment and forgiveness.
When speaking to one putter rep at a recent Tour event, I asked how putter-style percentages have changed over the last five years. He said what used to be a 70/30 split from blades to mallets has become 50/50 — which is a big jump considering how long some players will use a particular putter. This same rep added that it could completely swap to a 30/70 split in favor of mallets over the next few years.
Another part of this story is the renewed interest and use of longer counterbalanced putters like the Odyssey model used by Wyndham Clark and Rickie Fowler. To achieve the proper balance required to build a counterbalanced putter the head weight generally has to be above 400 grams, and getting a conventional blade to that mass can be difficult.
When looking at the 20 winners on the PGA Tour this season, the results speak for themselves — 75 percent of them were with a mallet putter, which includes a win with a long putter (by Akshay Bhatia). An even closer look at the OWGR shows eight of the top 10 players in the world use mallets, including all of the top five.
So if you’re a golfer who has been clinging onto your blade putter but looking to change things up on the greens, it might be time to look at the shifting trend being created by the best players in the world. See if switching to a mallet will help you drain a few more putts.
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