He played three seasons in Major League Baseball as a right-handed pitcher for the Detroit Wolverines in 1881 and 1882 and for the Buffalo Bisons in 1883.

Derby won 29 games and led the National League in both strikeouts and shutouts as a 24-year-old rookie in 1881.

His career was cut short, and he played in his final major league game in July 1883 at age 25.

[1] He began his professional baseball career at age 19 in 1877 with the Hornellsville, New York, team in the League Alliance.

He was described as "a compactly built, blonde haired, blue-eyed, pleasant-voiced gentleman who was to do all the pitching, and right well did he do his work.

[1] The Detroit Free Press described Derby's rise to stardom in the first part of the 1881 season:"His speed was moderate, but he was the master of all the crooks and curves that can be imparted to the aerial projectiles.

He was the wizard of the pitcher's box, and within a month George H. Derby had risen from obscurity to fame in base ball circles.

[1] However, late in the 1881 season, Derby's dominance waned, and opposing teams began hitting him more freely.

Derby complained that he had been unable to "give force to the ball" and therefore pitched fewer games in August and September 1881.

The Detroit Free Press wrote that Derby's star had sunk "beneath the base ball horizon" but questioned the fairness of a suspension: "If he [played poorly] intentionally, the sentence is just; if not, it is severe in the extreme.