Just watched the Director's cut

I have a vivid recollection of the theatrical cut of this film inside and out, as well as the cut released on VHS in the 80's.

Having watched the director's cut for the first time, which changes up the opening quite a bit, and also adds a fair amount of extra scenes - Max scouring the newspaper achives, Roy and his dad fly fishing - but cuts or shortens other scenes - Young Roy pitching the ball through the chicken coop wall, Roy and Iris running toward each other in the field at night - I have to say that I thought the film lost a lot in the director's cut. The only thing that was better was some of the foul language that seemed more like what a ball player might say, but it was pretty minor. In particular, the

The worst substitution was the line about "if you rely on your talent alone, you'll fail", and in the director's cut, which has a hackneyed line about an honest heart and a clear conscience, something like that.

With the line from the theatrical cut, Hobbs can be just a ball player. It sets the movie apart. In the directors cut, all the allegorical Arthurian / moralistic stuff just gets blown up to be too big, but in a lot of ways, it fits better to the actual arc of the main character.

One thing I did appreciate was that there was some obvious clean up of scenes to make visuals clearer. Also some of the audio mixing is definitely different (for example, the more pronounced sounds of electrical arc-ing during the final home run fireworks - ostensibly to explain how one blown bulb managed to create the massive short circuit).