Humpback pitch?

[MasterP]

So there's this one shot that's been puzzling me on how I do it and what I'm doing wrong. About once a round I'll hit a pitch shot from lets say 60 yards and flies like it has top spin. It's always with my sand wedge and feels like a decent shot off the clubface. The ball will get up in the air fine and then behave like it has top spin at the top of the arc, and usually fall short of the green. At first I thought it was the ball, but it looked fine and played fine the rest of the round.

Any ideas?

[Shanks A Million]

So there's this one shot that's been puzzling me on how I do it and what I'm doing wrong. About once a round I'll hit a pitch shot from lets say 60 yards and flies like it has top spin. It's always with my sand wedge and feels like a decent shot off the clubface. The ball will get up in the air fine and then behave like it has top spin at the top of the arc, and usually fall short of the green. At first I thought it was the ball, but it looked fine and played fine the rest of the round.

It sounds like what I call a "diver." The spin is not enough to hold it in the air for the whole flight, and at that magic point when the spin gets too low, the Reynolds number becomes low enough that the ball no longer has lift, and it drops like a stone. It happens more with the newer grooves I notice more than the older ones. The launch is high, the spin too low. You're probably not delofting the club and striking through the ball with acceleration on the shorter pitches.

I have a friend who's about to go to Q-school, (he's already a PGA pro), and he had to make the switch to the new grooves. He hit one of these the other day, just dove forward into the wind, and landed hard. It was pretty weird. Of course, I've seen him top and duff balls too.