Dear Jim,
My answers are "no" and "mostly."
While a face-balanced putter or even a "reality" balanced putter are best, the degree to which a heel-shafted putter or a 45-degree hanger (most heel-toe balanced putters) tends to flare toe-open in the backstroke is not that great. If you pay close attention to the feel of the putter handle inside your grip during the stroke, this feel varies with the tightness of the grip and grip pressure, With a soft grip pressure, you can just detect a mild tendency in these putters to flare open in the stroke. But fundamentally, if your focus is on MAINTAINING an orientation of the hands during the stroke, and match this with a little extra grip pressure to counter or control or cancel out any flaring tendency from the mild physics forces in the putter, you won't have much of a problem.
It basically boils down to you learning a specific putter's feel, and then adapting your grip pressure and level of awareness so that your expertise finds expression thru that specific tool.
In my approach, I try to maintain the orientation of the hands the same from address to end of stroke. Others (e.g., Stan Utley) counsel a rotating of the forearms that opens the face going back with reference to the target line (but not the stroke arc) and then re-close the face the same way into impact. So in this method, the controlling of any EXTRA opening tendency from the putter design would be designed to preserve the desired rotating action.
Usually, just a little extra thumb pressure is all that's required. I've had pretty good success with a Walter hagen heel-shafted blade and with a Hogan Junior heel-shafted blade.
In response to your sweetspot question, I "mostly" agree. On the one hand, a heel-toe weighting scheme doesn't really broaden the sweetspot. A "sweetspot" is simply a point location that represents a summation of the masses as distributed in a specific shape or design. It's still a point. What heel-toe weighting does is provide a more distributed inertial mass by moving mass out of the center of the face to the two ends. This mass distribution has the effect of reducing the loss of momentum transfer on impact by striking the ball off the face's center towards the toe or heel. It also ends to reduce face twist that would otherwise be more severe when the ball impact the far end of the face away from the center of gravity.
The main effect for our present discussion, however, is that heel-toe weighting or mass shaping has an effect on the tactile (and possibly auditory) feedback provided by impact. Solid impact is when the sweetspot of the putter (center of mass or gravity) moves in a line thru the ball's center of mass (center of the ball's sphere or core). This impact transmits a very definite pattern of vibrations up the shaft, depending upon the putter design and shaft characteristics, including length, swingweight, and grip type, as well as your setup positioning of hands and grip style and even stroke pattern. If you are consistent, this sweetspot-to-sweetspot impact is something you learn and become accustomed to so that you can notice when impact is "off" this ideal. Whenever impact is "off," the vibration pattern is less energetic and cohesive, so the "feel" is different. This is your feedback signal that something about the "off" stroke wasn't executed properly.
When you use a "normal" putter without heel-toe weighting, you still have some sort of mass-distribution shaping that influences feedback. It's just not as pronounced a pattern and does not have the same "contrast." So "off" impact in a "normal" putter has weaker vibrational patterns, more face twist, and less momentum transfer than a heel-toe weighted putter. We need to separate out each of these effects for our discussion.
What Pelz seems to have in mind is that the weaker vibrational pattern gives more pronounced tactile feedback with missing the sweetspot on a "normal" putter in contrast to the same degree of miss on a heel-toe weighted putter. I assume he also would agree that the "normal" putter would tend to twist more as well, resulting in a more dramatic tactile sense inside the grip of the hands and also providing more pronounced visual feedback as you may be able to observe visually the twisting of the face (usually too quick to really see much). And also, the "normal" putter's off-center impact will result in less momentum trasfer to the ball and hence a weaker and shorter roll of the ball than occurs with a heel-toe weighted putter -- a form of visual feedback.
All that said, there are two different approaches to putting: a) trying to execute a technically perfect stroke, and b) trying to use a specific putter to sink as many putts as possible. Pelz is referring to a). I believe that if you asked Tour pros whether a) or b) is the more important approach, they would answer with near unanimity that scoring is more important. They would want the best of both world's but the bottom line is scoring. So an elite golfer would probably choose the "game-improvement" feature of heel-toe weighting to minimize the costliness of off-center impacts, while also trying to always hit the putt with technically perfect sweetspot-to-sweetspot impact dynamics.
The real question is whether there is a significant diminiution in inculcating the ability to putt with technically perfect impact dynamics using a heel-toe weighted putter, or converesely, whether there is a significant benefit from using a "normal" putter. The trouble with using a "normal" putter without the pronounced heel-toe weighting arises when you want to actually play for score to your highest ability. If you then choose to switch to a heel-toe weighted putter, after practicing mostly with a "normal" putter, you are going to receive different and less discriminative feedback while playing. That strikes me as a bad plan.
The alternative is to use something like teacher clips on a heel-toe weighted putter to train the impact dynamics, to use impact tape to see your impact location and variability, or to simply pay more attention to impact feedback in its various forms when using the heel-toe weighted putter.
So, the first choice is to decide whether you want the benefits of heel-toe wieighting in your game. If so, it's probably best to focus on learning that chosen tool.
My somewhat complex answer then is that I mostly agree with his point about the differences in feedback, but I'm not too sure about what difference it makes or even whether it is wise. That would depend on you, your experiences, your alternative options, and your appraoch to putting and golf.
Cheers!
Geoff Mangum
Putting Theorist and Instructor
PuttingZone
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