The odds fetch used a bare requests.get, so it went out as
python-requests/x.y -- the one agent ESPN is known to reject. Around
2026-08-04 it began 403ing browser strings and bare custom tokens alike;
what it accepts is a token carrying a URL that says who is calling.
Every other ESPN caller in the tree already sends that header
(src/common/api_helper.py, src/base_classes/data_sources.py); this path
was simply missed.
It is the worst one to miss. Odds are fetched per live game from inside
the live update loop, so its failures are the ones that cost the caller
its whole update budget -- the same path the 5s timeout and the cooldown
were added to protect.
Sent via a session rather than per-call, which also reuses the
connection across a slate. Deliberately no retry adapter, unlike
api_helper: retries multiply request_timeout, which is 5s precisely to
stay inside the 30s operation budget.
The existing tests patched the module's requests.get, which this change
bypasses -- test_base_odds_manager was consequently reaching the real
ESPN and taking 404s. Both files now patch the session, and the new
tests pin the agent against api_helper's live value so the two cannot
drift apart the next time ESPN moves the goalposts.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Udr6MfaFLUPhX5Fgo67Jf5
Odds are fetched per live game from inside SportsLive.update(), with
show_odds defaulting on, and the plugin executor kills an operation at
30s. The odds request timeout was also 30s, so a single stalled request
consumed the entire budget and the update carrying every game's score
was killed.
Out of season that is invisible: preseason week 1 returns one game. A
Sunday slate is around sixteen, so the odds of at least one slow request
rise sharply just as the cost of losing the update does.
Shorten the request timeout to 5s, and after a network failure skip the
network for 60s. The timeout alone is not enough -- sixteen consecutive
5s timeouts still blow through -- and when ESPN is unreachable it is
unreachable for the whole slate, so the first failure already answers
the question for the rest of the pass.
before: one stalled request = 30s = the entire budget
after : 5s, the rest of the slate skipped, retry after 60s
The stale-cache fallback is unchanged: the cache is consulted before any
of this, and the failing request still falls back to it.
An earlier version of this branch also jittered the cache TTL to stagger
expiry across a slate. That has been dropped: CacheManager.set() stores
ttl for compatibility but the read path expires entries by a per-type
max_age (1800s for odds), so the jitter was inert. Making the read path
honour a per-entry ttl is a real fix but changes a contract 48 plugin
call sites already rely on, which is not a change to make two weeks
before the season.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Udr6MfaFLUPhX5Fgo67Jf5
Co-authored-by: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
