Last step is a doozy for Angels reliever Joe Smith

MINNEAPOLIS — Setup man Joe Smith was walking down the steps of the team hotel to hail a cab for a ride to Target Field on Saturday morning when he made the mistake of being cordial.

“There are about eight steps before the exit, and I was saying ‘See you later’ to the bellman,” Smith said. “I turned around, I thought I was at the bottom of the steps, and apparently I had one more left. I caught my heel, my toe went first, and now I’m in a walking boot.”

Smith suffered a left-ankle sprain, the severity of which isn’t known, but there is a chance the fluke injury could sideline him for the rest of the regular season. An X-ray did not show any broken bones, but there are only 14 games left, and ankle sprains usually take at least two weeks to heal.

“They said to wait for a couple days, see how the swelling and pain go,” said Smith, who had never sprained an ankle before. “I hope I can pitch again this season. All I can do is go to the training room and get back as soon as possible.”

In Smith’s absence, Manager Mike Scioscia said, the Angels will use “a committee” of relievers in the seventh and eighth innings, a group that will include Trevor Gott, Fernando Salas, Mike Morin and Jose Alvarez.

“It was a shock to all of us,” closer Huston Street said. “It was one of those freak accidents. It’s brutal. You just pray, you hope he comes back as soon as he can, but it’s up to other guys to step up.”

Slump buster

Albert Pujols snapped a career-long 0-for-25 slump with a single in the fourth inning of the nightcap and jokingly asked the Twins for the ball. Pitcher Mike Pelfrey, thinking it was a milestone hit, tossed it to the Angels dugout.

“The guys signed it for me,” Pujols said with a laugh. “It was huge.”

His next hit was bigger. With no score in the sixth, Erick Aybar and Kole Calhoun singled with one out. Pujols hit a laser to the left-center-field gap with an exit velocity of 108 mph for a two-run double, and David Murphy followed with a bloop RBI single for a 3-0 lead.

Chris Iannetta added a solo homer to left-center in the seventh, his second homer in three games, and Mike Trout blasted his team-leading 39th homer, a 442-foot shot to center, for a 5-1 lead in the eighth.

After going 10-19 in August and falling 71/2 games back in the American League West, the Angels are 12-6 in September and right in the thick of the playoff race.

Short hops

The Angels scored their first two runs in the sixth inning of the first game on Trout’s sacrifice fly and C.J. Cron’s RBI fielder’s-choice grounder, and Murphy added an RBI groundout in the seventh. . . . Minnesota first baseman Joe Mauer extended his on-base streak to 39 games with an eighth-inning walk in the nightcap, the longest Twins streak since Harmon Killebrew reached base in 40 straight games in 1967.

mike.digiovanna@latimes.com