Slate identity: yyyy-mm-dd-away-home, canonical team codes.

Midnight US/Eastern of the game date.

Winning team abbreviation when status is settled.

settled when a winner is booked.

Stable, machine-readable code identifying the failure; branch on this rather than on message. One of bad_request, unauthorized, forbidden, not_found, conflict, service_unavailable, upstream_error, service_error, or internal_error.

Human-readable explanation, safe to show to a user. For client errors it names the specific problem; for server-side failures it is a generic notice and the underlying detail is deliberately withheld.