Frisbees sail about in the Circle now, tossed by students in their jeans and sneakers, or cutoffs and shorts with tank tops when Poughkeepsie’s weather permits. So it’s true, kind of: The more things change, the more they remain the same. Here in the Circle is where were played the first baseball games for women in the history of the country, of the world.

“They are getting up various clubs now for out-of-door exercise,” wrote home Annie Glidden of Vassar Female College’s first class, her letter dated April 20, 1866. “They have a floral society, boat clubs, and base-ball clubs. I belong to one of the latter, and enjoy it highly I can assure you.”

Vassar pioneered the idea of sports for young ladies in America, a concept entirely new. “Of special importance to the student is the relation of athletics to the hygiene of the brain,” said Sophia Foster Richardson, looking back after decades to when she, like Annie Glidden, played baseball in the Circle at Vassar. And that was hardball. Softball came long afterward. Strenuous games were not a “foe to scholarship,” Richardson had found; indeed, the student “puts her brain in fit condition for study by some vigorous play.”

But baseball? Slide, baby, slide? Stick it in her ear? Kill the ump? Yes. The first students formed two teams almost as soon as they checked into Main, Vassar’s first building, modeled on the Tuileries soon to be burned by the Paris mob rebelling against Napoleon III and the lost war with Prussia. One team was the Laurel Base Ball Club, the other was the Abenakis, a title whose meaning does not instantly come to mind. (There is a close parallel a century and a quarter on, for not immediately apparent are the precise meanings of all the names of such recent Vassar intramural teams as Sexual Anarchists, Backdoor, Boys Be Hoppin’, UNICEF All-Stars, Nasty Girls, Modern Wenches at Play, Chinga Chompers, Gutrot, Mother Puckers, Sick Animals, Hondo’s Team, Pete’s Dream Machine, Six Pack, Kicking Dudes, Boy Scout Death Camp, Undergrowth, and Yummy Purple Awakening.)

Soon, the Precocious Base Ball Club joined Laurel and Abenakis. In their high-necked and frilled long gowns, they played their Vassar matches: “Upon its Circle, the base ball clubs flourish and there are the mighty brought low,” reported the July 1875 Vassar Miscellany when the number of clubs had grown to seven. By then, the “Female” was gone from the college’s name, for the word had come to be seen as an inaccurate designation. It seemed to imply of the new school, said the influential magazine Godey’s Lady’s Book, that “all female creatures may there be instructed; that idea would, besides including all ages of womankind, also take in animals.” The founder, Matthew Vassar, who had put up the money and land for the college, agreed. The word, he decided, was a “degraded vulgarism.”

But, increasingly, the baseball clubs