The short game is king, or so we are told by manufacturers who want us to buy their clubs. Forty years ago, professional golfers carried two wedges. Now, most of them carry three, and four is not out of the question. How many wedges should you carry, and how do you decide?

Let's look first at the wedges that are available to you, one by one, to see what each one does.

Your pitching wedge, which came with your set of irons, doubles as a fairway club and a pitching club. You can chip around the green with it, too. There's no reason why you wouldn't carry it and use it often.

Next up is the sand wedge, a traditional club. You use it to get out of the sand, of course, but its real value is in pitching from short distances. It can be the most versatile club in your bag, with no end to the shots you can play with it by varying how you set up.

The lob wedge. It gets the ball real high, real fast. It has less bounce than a sand wedge, so it's safer to use off tight lies in the fairway. If you have to get over something and stop the ball in a hurry, this is your club. You can use standard setup and not have open the clubface to get extra loft, which is always risky.

Finally, the gap wedge. This wedge fills the gap between the pitching wedge and sand wedge. Its purpose is to give you a 4-degree progression through your edges: 48-52-56-60 degrees. This would make it easy to hit a pitch any distance from 100 yards in and get the ball close. It would also allow for finer differences in chips right around the green, too. You would have four different shots with the same setup. That's a big plus.

So. Which wedges should you put in your bag? Hale Irwin said he won three U. S. Opens carrying only one additional wedge, a 56-degree sand wedge. You might need only this one extra wedge, too, in the 54- to 56-degree range.

If you want to have a lob wedge, then a 48-54-60 progression makes sense. Think before you add the fourth wedge, though. You will probably have to take out a club to make room, since the fourth wedge could put you over the 14-club limit. That would probably be one of your long irons that you don't hit that often.

Though there are benefits of adding wedges, there are costs, too. You have to make an additional purchase, so there's more dollars out of your pocket. You have to learn what the new wedge can do differently than you ones you already have, and that's extra time at the range. Then look at how many strokes the new wedge will save you. If it's one or two a round, by all means go for it. If it's one or two a month, then practice more with the wedges you already have.

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