Perhaps Chris Davis has had his first hit of the season by now. Perhaps not. In the same indifferent and disconnected way we watch Chris’ sojourn, we are spectators to the malaise enveloping Baltimore. Crime, schools, potholes, the Mayor…

Recent articles only increase our sense of hopelessness and the weight of our entropy. First came the March New York Times Magazine’s lead story by Alec MacGillis on The Tragedy of Baltimore, tracing the dystopian path that caused our city to ineluctably fall apart, physically and metaphorically. Then as civic leaders try to spin the realities of MacGillis’ story, arrives David Zurawik’s column this month in the Sun. Zurawik responded that Baltimore’s demise isn’t as reductive,as one leader apparently suggested, as comparing the burnishing New York got with Friends, Seinfeld and Sex in the City to the tarnishing we got with Homicide and the Wire. Zurawik is right. Ours is not an image problem, ours is an existential one. You can’t market your way out of existential issues. So the malaise envelops us all.

Which brings us to what we need: leadership. The Board of Directors of the Greater Baltimore Committee got around on Friday to passing a resolution that Mayor Pugh should resign. That’s not really news, given that bandwagon is getting pretty full. What was news, which skirts the question of leadership, is the number of prestigious board members who abstained. I suspect their abstentions had less to do with some fundamental disagreement over the Mayor’s tenure than the fact that they or their organizations are entangled in the Healthy Holly mess or some other interaction with the Mayor’s causes, UMMS or another of Baltimore’s webs.

It’s hard to see where the leadership is going to come from. We all seem to be waiting for someone or something to step in and reshape the norms of our city. Chris has a choice: he can retire, move away and write a new chapter for his life. I guess we too can move away. Many have done so throughout Baltimore’s suburbs, commenting on how rare are their trips into the City. Those most in need can’t move and endure under siege. There is a vaporous sense we share that Baltimore needs to change and soon. Leadership rarely transmogrifies from vapor. And so we wait and wait, while Chris whiffs and whiffs. And subpoenas, flotsam from our Mayor, begin arriving at the doors of our civic elite.

With more than 30 years’ experience in law and business, Newt Fowler, a partner in Womble Bond Dickinson’s business practice, advises many investors, entrepreneurs and technology companies, guiding them through all aspects of business planning, financing transactions, technology commercialization and M&A. He’s the pastboard chair of TEDCO. Newt can be reached at newt.fowler@wbd-us.com.