Every major putter OEM spent the last three years engineering torque out of their mallets. Bettinardi just engineered it back into one.
The new Antidote Hexperimental #2 is, at first glance, a minor line extension. Bettinardi took the SB2, a center-shafted zero-torque mallet from the original Hexperimental drop, and swapped the hosel for a plumber's neck. The three-part 303 stainless and 6061 aluminum body carries over. The F.I.T. face milling carries over. The two-tone topline carries over. What changes is the torque profile: the plumber's neck reintroduces toe hang and, with it, the exact characteristic the original SB2 was designed to eliminate.
The direction of that swap is the story. Since L.A.B. Golf forced the category open in 2022, essentially every major putter brand has moved the same way. Odyssey Square 2 Square. TaylorMade Spider ZT. PXG Allan. Scotty's Phantom 5.5 and 11.5 with the counterbalance shafts. Evnroll Zero. Bettinardi's own original Hexperimental line in April. The design brief across every one of those releases was the same: take a traditional head, kill the torque, chase the L.A.B. buyer. Bettinardi just released the first meaningful counter-move, taking a zero-torque head and adding torque back.
The commercial logic is straightforward. Zero-torque putters test well in aggregate, MyGolfSpy's 2026 data confirms it, but aggregate performance is not fitting performance. Plenty of players who have released the putter the same way for twenty years do not suddenly putt better when the face stays open through impact. Bettinardi is essentially acknowledging that its own SB2 shape has fans who bounced off the center-shaft build, and giving those buyers a version that fits their stroke. That's fitting-bay math, not a philosophical statement.
But it is worth asking whether the zero-torque category is closer to saturation than the release cadence suggests. Used-bin turnover is the honest metric here, and there are a lot of barely-used zero-torque putters moving through secondary channels right now. The category grew faster than any putter subsegment since the mallet boom of the mid-2000s, and history says a category that grows that fast tends to normalize. The 2005 to 2008 mallet wave produced the Odyssey 2-Ball, the White Hot XG, the original Spider. By 2012, tour counts had rebalanced and the blade came back into fashion. Trends in this category rarely die. They just stop being the only thing brands ship.
Bettinardi is a useful brand to watch on this specifically because it is not a volume player. At a DORMIED global rank of 36, the brand operates in a tier where every SKU has to justify itself against a small, discerning customer base that talks to each other on WRX and at fitting studios. Bettinardi does not have the shelf space to chase a fading trend. If the Hexperimental line is where the company signals what it thinks is next, and Sam Bettinardi's quote frames it that way, then adding a plumber's neck to a zero-torque head is a small but deliberate hedge.
The Phantom 11.5 and the Spider Tour plumber's neck have been quietly stable sellers through the entire zero-torque cycle. Mallets that play like blades never really left. Bettinardi is betting that customer is still there, and that the fitting conversation two years from now sounds less like "do you want zero-torque" and more like "what stroke are we actually building around." That's a more mature version of the category, and it's probably where it lands. The Hexperimental #2 is not the inflection point. It's the first release that acts like the inflection point is coming.
