(From John Thorn, "The Changing Game")
This is not a new or isolated case.
What Bill James referred to as "Range Factor" in the 1980s was actually used more than 100 years earlier. As Thorn wrote, in 2012:
The fielding stats of 1876 were combined to form an average, the "percentage of chances accepted," or fielding percentage. A "missing link" variant, devised by Al Wright in 1875, was to ... divide putouts plus assists by games to get "fielding average." These averages took no account of errors. (Does Wright's "fielding average" look familiar?