When baseball's potentates enlarged the strike zone by almost a foot recently they had one chief objective: to speed up the game and make it more attractive to spectators. If the change accomplishes this I think it is a good one, despite what the handicap will mean for that noble savage, the .300 hitter.

Sports change over the years, and every time someone tries something new the traditionalists raise agonized protests (and no sports fans are more agonizing than baseball fanatics who cherish the most incredible statistics).

Football introduced the forward pass, basketball the one-handed shot, and baseball threw out the spitter. Now we have a larger strike zone, but it remains to be seen whether fewer pitches and bases on balls will cure the more deep-rooted ills of the national pastime.

Baseball is unique among the popular team sports in America in that it does not have a time limit. This is at once its greatest attraction and most serious fault.

On the one hand, absence of a time limit creates dramatic situations unapproachable in any other sport. Bobby Thomson's home run in the 1951 National League play-off game is one example of how baseball produces truly memorable moments because of its deliberate pace.

On the other hand, absence of a time limit often produces incredibly long, dull ball games that usually end with only a few diehards still in the stands. In the last few years the public has been rebelling against the tedium that marks most baseball games. Changing the rule might help--I hope it does--but baseball might well be doomed to a gradual decline in popularity if recently shifts in public attitudes continue.

Today, one can make a very good case for football as our national sport, and its popularity has been growing every season. Football combines ample displays of speed, grace, and brute power with a great deal of action. Baseball might provide a moment of power when Mickey Mantle blasts one into the bleachers at Yankee Stadium, or a moment of speed when Maury Wills takes off for second base. But Mantle would have to hit 15 home runs a game to rival the spectacle of Jimmy Brown hitting the Giants' line.

It is interesting that Wills' assault on Cobb's record and Maris' home run splurge two years ago did excite public interest; but such moments in baseball are rare, and the sport cannot hope to provide the sustained action and excitement one can find almost any Saturday afternoon in Soldiers Field, let alone in Green Bay.

In an age when the element of sheer physical excitement is missing from so many lives, football and such sports as hockey and lacrosse are becoming more attractive to the spectator who craves vicarious adventure, and even danger.

These columns are hardly the best place to explore the psychic state of the American character. But I suspect the reasons for the decline of baseball and the rise of football can ultimately be found in changing psychological attitudes.

Baseball may have shorter games and lower bases on balls next season, but it will never have Paul Hornung or Y. A. Tittle, or for that matter, Billy Grana.