Ask a golfer what wedges they play and you'll get a brand and three lofts. Ask what bounce they're on and the answer is usually a shrug, or a number they read off the hosel once.

That's backwards. Loft decides how far the ball goes. Bounce and sole shape decide whether the club works at all on the ground you play. A 56 that's wrong for your turf will chunk and blade on the same afternoon, and no amount of practice fixes it, because you're fighting the tool.

Bounce, in one paragraph

Set a wedge down with the shaft straight up. The leading edge sits slightly off the ground, and the angle between the ground and the sole is the bounce. It's the club's resistance to digging — the sole skids where the leading edge would cut.

More bounce means the club works harder to stay out of the turf. Less bounce means it gets under the ball more easily and punishes you faster when you come in steep.

Which way you need to go

Not your handicap. Two things:

Your turf. Soft, wet, lush — the Pacific Northwest for eight months a year — wants more bounce. Firm, tight, sandy wants less.
Your divot. Steep attack angle and a deep divot wants more bounce. A shallow sweeper who barely marks the ground wants less, because high bounce will bounce the leading edge into the middle of the ball.

Those two can disagree. A steep player on firm turf is the genuinely hard fit, and it's where sole shape earns its keep rather than the bounce number.

Bunkers are their own answer. Soft, fluffy sand wants more bounce; firm, wet, compacted sand wants less. If your home course has one kind of sand all year, fit the sand wedge to it.

Grind is the other half

Grind is material taken off the sole after forging — usually the heel, the toe, and the trailing edge. It doesn't change the bounce number on the hosel, and it changes how the club behaves more than the number does.

The reason it matters: when you open the face to hit a higher, softer shot, a full flat sole rolls the leading edge up off the ground, and now the club is sitting above the ball. Relieve the heel and you can lay the face open and keep the leading edge down. That's the whole trick behind every flop shot you've watched someone else hit.

Broadly: more relief means more versatility and less forgiveness on a square-faced full shot. A wide, flat sole is the opposite — very hard to chunk, much harder to manipulate. Most players want the versatile grind in their highest-lofted wedge and the stable one in their gap wedge, which almost always gets hit square and full.

The mistake that costs more shots than either

Gapping.

A modern pitching wedge is often 43 to 46 degrees — lofts crept stronger for years while wedges stayed where they were. Someone who buys a 56 and a 60 to go under a 44-degree pitching wedge has left a twelve-degree hole in the most-used part of their bag, which plays out as a stock shot they don't have from about 100 yards.

Space them four to six degrees apart and start from your actual pitching wedge loft, not from what the club is stamped. That usually means a 50 or 52 in the bag, and it's the cheapest shot you'll ever buy.

The S-SPEC runs 50, 52, 54, 56 and 58 for exactly this reason — the gaps are there to be filled, not admired.

What forged actually buys you

Honestly: feel, and bendability. Not distance, and not spin.

The Toura heads we stock come out of a forge in Ichikawa, in the Himeji area, and the steel is S25C — a soft carbon steel Japanese makers have long favoured for wedges. Two things follow from soft. The first is the one people buy it for, which is the sensation at impact, and that's real but subjective. The second is more useful: soft steel bends predictably, so when we set your lie angle it goes where we put it and stays there.

The trade is wear. Soft carbon grooves don't last as long as a harder cast head, especially if you practise a lot out of sand. If you're putting in two hundred bunker shots a week, that's a real cost and worth knowing before you spend the money, not after.

What we stock

The S-SPEC Gen 2, in 50, 52, 54, 56 and 58 degrees at $159. The heads are hand-forged and hand-finished rather than cast, the bounce sits in the middle of the range, and the sole is cut away in several places and rounded off toward the heel. In the terms set out above, that puts it at the versatile end — enough relief to open the face without the leading edge climbing, enough sole left under it to stay stable on a square full shot. It's a wedge that suits a range of swings rather than one.

We also build TaylorMade wedges from heads — MG5 in chrome and charcoal, Milled Grind 4, and the Hi-Toe 4 — shaft and grip chosen with you rather than handed over at stock spec.

And you can hit one first. The S-SPEC 56 and the Epon M2 Tour in 54 and 56 are in the demo program at $25. A week with a wedge on your own turf answers the bounce question better than any chart on this page will.

Wedge shafts are a separate question

Most players want their wedge shafts a little heavier than their irons, for stability on the partial shots that make up most wedge play. That's covered properly in the guide on shaft weight — short version, Modus wedge demos are $15 and settle it in a dozen balls.

When the wedge isn't the problem

If you're hitting it fat and thin with every club, that's a low point problem and a new wedge will not fix it. If the contact is fine and the distances are wrong, go back to gapping before you go shopping. And if your current wedges are four or five seasons old and heavily used, the honest answer may be that the grooves are gone and the bounce was fine all along.

Wedges are worth fitting when the strike is good and the result still isn't.

Questions on any of this — or bring them by and we'll check the lie angles while you're here.