ANAHEIM, Calif. -- With his next home run, Rougned Odor will be in position to make history: He will have put together the least valuable 30 home run season in major league history.

Dave Kingman will finally be off the hook.

At least where the subject is lots of home runs with little impact.

In 1986, Kingman, considered the biggest one-trick pony of all-time, hit 35 home runs for the Oakland A's. He did nothing else worthwhile. In addition to sending a live rat to a female sportswriter for which he was fined and nearly released, Kingman compiled an OPS of .686. It stands as the only 30 home run season in history in which the batter failed to crack a .700 OPS.

After a three-run homer that "cut" Seattle's deficit from nine runs to six on Thursday, Odor sits at 29 homers and a .668 OPS.

He has no shot at .700 and will have to have a ridiculous surge in the final 15 games to avoid falling below him. For that matter, the Rangers will also have to surge ridiculously for this season to go down as anything less than a significant disappointment.

In other advanced metrics, he comes out just as poorly:

-- OPS+: In the more advanced form of OPS which weighs additional factors to provide a number in context to league average (100), Odor currently is at 70. The lowest for a 30-homer hitter: 86 by Colorado's Vinny Castilla in 1999.

-- WAR: Wins Above Replacement, tries to factor in defense and baserunning, but in the offensive component of WAR, only three players have hit 30 homers and had a 0.0 or negative Offensive WAR. Kingman, at -0.9, is the worst. If Mike Napoli, currently at 29 homers and a -0.5 Offensive WAR, adds one more, he'll likely have the second worst. Odor, at 0.0, would be the fifth player in history.

Bottom line: It's been a bad season. Odor knows it.

"I think I've tried to do too much," Odor said before Friday's game at Los Angeles. "I know I'm not hitting like I'm supposed to. I go to the cage, I do so much work and then I try more. I want to get back to just playing the game. I'm going to learn a lot of from this. I will know how to better handle it."

The learning is a key. For Kingman, the all-or-nothing season signaled the end of his career; he never had another major league at-bat. Odor, who is 23, will be in the second year of a six-year contract. There remains a future ahead of him.

The challenge as 2017 starts to fade into preparing for 2018: Where does he go from here?

For manager Jeff Banister, the key is not to focus on what he did wrong -- statistics show he swung at the first pitch at a career-high rate and also swung-and-missed at a similar rate -- but on what he does well.

"To get to where you want to go, there are some gut punches that you have to endure," Banister said. "Everybody has a 'nitro' zone and a place where they have success. It's about knowing your swing."

For Odor, that means better recognizing the line between pitches above the strike zone, where he struggles, and the upper part of the zone, where he crushes pitches. It means forcing pitchers to throw pitches up and away, instead of in on his hands. When he hits balls in those four up-and-away quadrants of the strike zone, he's a .323 hitter for his career; anywhere else the average falls to .228.

"This game tells you what you need to do to get better," Banister said. "In that regard, I think he will be a great student, a really good learner."

If so, the pain of sharing ignominy with Dave Kingman may well be worth the long-term rewards.

And, besides, he didn't send anybody a rat.

Twitter: @Evan_P_Grant