Not all victims of the Steroid Era are as obvious as Taylor Hooton, the high school pitcher who fell into depression after taking steroids and committed suicide.

Attention isn’t called to all the slighted parties as frequently as to Hank Aaron, passed by Barry Bonds and his modern muscles.

All pitchers used to be considered the cheated ones until whispers of juiced fastballs, which gathered steam eight years or so ago, grew louder and louder and ultimately turned to shouts in the Mitchell Report with Roger Clemens and Andy Pettitte getting called out.

With each new whisper and public allegation, the list of victims among active players dwindles, all of which makes Frank Thomas more cheated than ever.

Fittingly, when Thomas slugged his 500th home run in late June, the baseball world’s focus was trained on tainted slugger Bonds’ pursuit of Aaron.

Overshadowed by a cheater again.

“It means a lot to me because I did it the right way,” Thomas said of the milestone. Believe him.

Thomas sensed early in his career with the Chicago White Sox that cheaters would pass him. He was among the first to call for steroid testing when doing so was inviting the cold shoulder from union brothers. It was not the words as much as his expression when he talked about steroids that made his message resonate. He had the pained look of a grade-school boy sitting on the bench, watching the coach’s less-talented son play in his place.

Thomas became the 21st hitter in baseball history to reach 500 home runs in late June. The 500 club would be more exclusive, if not for cheaters. The number no longer means automatic Hall of Fame induction, as Mark McGwire’s first-try election failure showed, but I can guarantee Thomas will get this Hall of Fame vote.

Thomas won back-to-back MVP honors in 1993 and ’94. After missing most of the 2004 and 2005 seasons with a bum ankle, he left the White Sox and has had two terrific bounce-back seasons, with the Oakland A’s and then the Toronto Blue Jays.

He has more walks than strikeouts in his career and nine times has finished in the top 10 in MVP voting. He finished second to Jason Giambi in 2000. It would be a nice gesture if Giambi forfeited his MVP trophy and asked that it be presented to Thomas. Not many, if any, others who turned injections into hardware would follow, but it would be a nice step in the right direction for Major League Baseball, which owes some of its growth to the home run battle waged throughout the summer of 1998 between inflated sluggers Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa.

Such an act would be as powerful as the moment Rafael Palmeiro pointed at Congressmen, right through all our televisions, and said, “I have never used steroids, period. I do not know how to say it any more clearly than that.”

Those of us who had press passes that put our ears in the middle of the whispers were convinced he was lying. Less than five months later, Palmeiro was suspended for flunking a steroid test.