Best golf courses near Baltimore, MD

Mount Pleasant was the site of Arnold Palmer’s third PGA Tour win at the 1956 Eastern Open. The event was played at Mount Pleasant from 1950-1958, with other winners including Sam Snead, Cary Middlecoff and Bob Toski. The public parkland track just north of downtown Baltimore also hosted the 1939 U.S. Amateur Public Links.

The East Course at Baltimore Country Club, also known as the Five Farms Course, was one of many outstanding A.W. Tillinghast designs nationally ranked for decades by Golf Digest. Still, even jewels need polishing now and then. The club brought in Keith Foster, perhaps the most modest of modern-day course architects. He chooses to work solely on restorations, no more than two at a time, and declines to self-promote. At Baltimore Country Club, Foster removed trees (which nearly everyone is doing these days), rebuilt greens to make them manageable with today’s green speeds, re-established Tillinghast’s bunkering, regrassed everything and brought back sparkle to the East Course. The par-3s here rank among the best Tillinghast built, as does the stretch run from the par-5 14th to the strong par-3 17th.

To compare the present Caves Valley against that which was originally built in the early 1990s is to recognize how much Tom Fazio has felt obligated to adjust his courses to today’s club and ball technology. Back in 1991, the opening hole was a dogleg-left with a trap at the turn. Today, it has four bunkers framing the landing area. The par-5 third had just two “buffer bunkers” along a lake to the right to stop high-handicap slices from landing in the drink. Those buffers are still there, but so too are three enormous bunkers down the left, stretching over 300 yards from the back tee. And so it is all the way around Caves Valley. There are now target bunkers mainly in play for big hitters and frontal bunkers at several greens to force pin-seekers to throw it in the air. Caves Valley is a players’ club, and one remains a player only by being constantly challenged during a round.