Okay, we're only exaggerating a little bit for dramatic effect, but the truth is, Cleveland Golf surprised a lot of people with their latest Frontline putters. The new Frontline family was created after Cleveland's R&D team approached putter design from a completely different angle and created a high moment of inertia (MOI) lineup which is nothing short of spectacular.
To begin with a little bit of company history, Cleveland Golf is world-renowned for crafting premium Tour and cavity back wedges. However, this time, their engineers working together with the company's Tour staff, and especially their short game specialists, came up with a novel idea, which ended up in the new Frontline putter family. The Frontline putters boast a forward CoG (center of gravity), which, according to Cleveland's specialists, putt straighter than ever before and, more than that, they deliver incredible consistency. That sounds just about right as far as putters are concerned, but it gets even better.
It's a known fact that the gold standard regarding putter stability is forgiveness, which derives from a putter's moment of inertia implementation. Cleveland themselves keep telling us this since like, forever. Now, with their new Frontline putter, weight was placed far away from the center, or at least as far away as humanly possible. This interesting design approach is meant to lessen the amount of twist in the putter's body at ball impact. However, it's a little bit more complicated than that, as according to Cleveland, not all moment of inertia is created equal, or something along these lines. To make it real simple, Cleveland claims that you require weights located in the putter's face if you want to strike straighter putts on and on again.
Okay then you may ask, but how does it work? If you know a thing or two about putters, you're already familiar with MOI and mallet-style putters to feature weights located in the rear of the head, in order to promote more stability on off-center hits. Cleveland's research and development team proved that while placing rear weights works great in regard to increasing the moment of inertia, the same weights will move the CoG towards the back of the head, and that's not so great. Actually, they say this is a real problem in a premium putter, a problem that requires a quick fix. So, how can you fix accuracy issues, since a putter with a CoG positioned in the face is more accurate than an identical putter with the CoG placed rearward? The answer is tungsten, baby. To be more precise, the new Frontline family of putters comes with 47 grams of tungsten located in the face (where else?), and this clever design trick manages to bring the CoG forward, thus working its magic with boosting accuracy.
The genius of this solution is its simplicity, and the technology proved to be incredibly efficient accuracy wise. Here’s Cleveland Golf’s official statement about the Frontline range:
“We are very excited about Frontline because it is a completely new approach to putter designBy pairing an extreme centre of gravity with a speed optimized face, we’ve designed a putter that maximizes directional and speed consistency. Combined with slick black cosmetics, great shapes and hosel options for different stroke types, Frontline really is the whole package.”
The quote above pertains to Jacob Lambeth, Research and Development Engineer at Cleveland Golf, who also said that the real challenge was to craft a putter that’s strong enough to mitigate miss hits and deliver straight/consistent putts. And yes, they managed to pull that off by employing Tungsten Forward Weighting technology. Now, if you’re wondering what’s that, and how it works, it’s really simple: 2 tungsten weights are metal injection molded in the face of the putter, and that’s about it. However, if you think this is simple and straightforward, you should know that mallets had weights in the rear for decades. The Frontline family took the opposite approach to “ancient wisdom”, and they hit the accuracy jackpot with this one.
The new Frontline putters also feature Cleveland’s proprietary SOFT tech, which stands for Speed Optimized Face Technology. SOFT works by normalizing ball speed across the face, and that translates into consistent distance performance. There are 3 different mallet options to help with proper alignment, and 2 distinct hosel types, for the perfect fit: slant neck and single bed.
